Remember when Katy Perry told us she was “ready for abduction”? Lauren Sánchez was listening.
On Thursday, Jeff Bezos’s aerospace company, Blue Origin, announced that the pop star will soon be blasting off our planet with an all-female crew led by the billionaire’s fiancée. Sánchez and Perry will be #takingupspace in the New Shepard rocket’s detachable capsule with Gayle King, who announced the voyage plans on CBS Mornings. (She said BFF Oprah Winfrey approves.)
The other space girls in their crew include rocket scientist Aisha Bowe, civil-rights activist Amanda Nguyen, and film producer Kerianne Flynn. You’d think they could have also squeezed in Pete Davidson, who you may remember backed out of a 2022 Blue Origin flight for undisclosed reasons.
The all-gals voyage, the 11th Blue Origin New Shepard journey to include humans, will take place sometime this spring, presumably before Perry embarks on her tour to promote her latest album, the critically panned 143. Perhaps her roughly 11-minute flight, including four minutes of weightlessness at the boundaries of outer space, will inspire new feminist, electronic-dance music she can debut this summer in Ibiza and Mexico City. By then, she’ll be able to boast that she’s been farther from Earth than Elon Musk, who despite all his talk of wanting to die on Mars has yet to actually visit space. I recommend he give “Firework” a few hundred listens to build up the courage.
Hopefully Perry will go back on Call Her Daddy to share her observations of our planet from above. Or even better, she could bring onboard the livestream cameras she used to document her life for 72 nonstop hours to promote her album Witness in 2017.