Katy Perry and five other women have joined Blue Origin’s next space flight, New Shepard-31 (NS-31).
Perry, an American singer-songwriter, is a global superstar. Her 2010 album “Teenage Dream” earned her five number-one songs from a single album on the Billboard Hot 100, an achievement she shares with Michael Jackson.
Her hits, such as “Firework,” “Roar” and “Dark Horse,” have made her one of the best-selling musical artists of all time. Now, while she faces the biggest controversy of her career, she is embarking into space.
Perry will be joined on the flight by Gayle King, co-host of CBS Mornings; Aisha Bowe, former NASA rocket scientist; Amanda Nguyen, bioastronautics research scientist; Kerianne Flynn, American film producer; and Lauren Sánchez, an Emmy Award-winning journalist and fiancée of Jeff Bezos.
Blue Origin, established by Bezos in 2000, leads the space tourism industry. The company’s mission is clear on its website: “We envision a future where millions of people will live and work in space with a single-minded purpose: to restore and sustain Earth, our blue origin.”
NS-31 will be the program’s 11th space tourism flight and the 31st mission for the New Shepard rocket.
The mission marks a historic moment, as it will be the first all-female space crew since Soviet astronaut Valentina Tereshkova’s solo space flight in 1963. The trip will last about 11 minutes and travel just past the Kármán line into space, about 62 miles above sea level. No pilots will be aboard the ship.
Luxury travel, such as Blue Origin’s New Shepard missions, offers opportunities available only to the wealthiest individuals. Though not publicly disclosed, the cost of boarding the New Shepard is estimated to range from hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars.
However, these luxury trips are not all fun and games. OceanGate, founded in 2009 by Stockton Rush and Guillermo Söhnlein, was a deep-sea exploration company. In 2021, the company began taking expeditions to the Titanic’s ruins.
In June 2023, a trip to the shipwreck ended in tragedy when OceanGate’s Titan submersible imploded, killing the passengers aboard. Rush, Hamish Harding, Paul-Henry Nargeolet, Shahzada Dawood and Dawood’s son Suleman were the people onboard.
Opulent would be an appropriate word to describe this form of luxury travel. The term means “very comfortable and expensive,” as defined by Briticanna. This word is most typically associated with ostentatious displays of riches.
Commercial space travel and deep sea exploration open an entirely new world to adventure-seeking wayfarers. However, the opulent nature of such trips limits these once-in-a-lifetime opportunities to a small subset of fortunate individuals, such as Katy Perry.
Although some may enjoy living vicariously through public figures who embark on these journeys, others may see this as a widening divide between ordinary people and A-listers.
Much like concert tickets, travel is becoming increasingly expensive. Going on road trips or weekend getaways with friends is becoming less of a spontaneous activity and more so something that requires planning months in advance.
When Perry blasts off this spring, millions will be watching. The question remains: will this ship one day transport the average person?
