Sorry Katy Perry, you are no firework in space exploration

Last Monday, the Blue Origin NS-31 suborbital space flight was a pioneering exercise in self-conceit. Jeff Bezos's fleet of New Shepard automatic rockets is vanity space tourism now shamefully passing pioneering space exploration.

The six-person mission (with a guest list curated by Bezos' fiancée, Lauren Sánchez) included pop star Katy Perry, CBS Mornings co-host Gayle King, film producer Kerianne Flynn, activist Amanda Nguyen, and former NASA rocket scientist Aisha Bowe.

"It's about us. It's about making Space for future women and taking up Space and belonging," said Perry in a post-flight interview. "And it's about this wonderful world that we see right out there and appreciating it. This is all for the benefit of Earth."

Do as you will with your time and your money. But please, God, do not turn the circumstances of a highly wealthy all-female crew into some boundary-pushing moment of humanity.

The privatisation of Space has hitherto been the stuff of science fiction. Blue Origin was founded in 2000 by Bezos, the billionaire entrepreneur who also started Amazon. SpaceX was likewise founded by Elon Musk in 2002 with a vision of decreasing the costs of space launches, paving the way to a sustainable colony on Mars.

Space tourism's commercial and technological viability has blossomed in the 21st century, but it is not a new concept. In the 1980s, NASA launched a Space Flight Participant program to allow citizens without scientific or governmental roles to fly.

In 1984, engineer Charles D. Walker became the first non-government astronaut to do so, with his employer, McDonnell Douglas, paying the equivalent of $121,063 in 2024 for his flight. Little has changed. Blue Origin has not released full ticket prices, but a $150,000 deposit is required to reserve a seat.

But not in the tainted corporatist nightmares of Philip K. Dick or Isaac Asimov could it feel so gratuitous that non-government, non-specialist passengers would delude themselves into thinking they were pushing boundaries.

Cicero got it wrong when he said, "Glory follows virtue as if it were its shadow." A foul smell follows 21st-century fame, made worse by the egocentric spectacle that Space is now wholly the purview of the rich and powerful, passed off as beneficial to the rest of the plebs on the ground.

Sanchez invited her pals, and off they went. A private enterprise is a private enterprise. But what is slowly becoming the norm is celebrities using the experience to proselytise on the profound synergy they've witnessed and how it's altered their state of being. And it is gut-wrenchingly awkward.

Perry, in amongst a raft of bizarre comments and actions regarding the flight, dropped the nugget that she thinks "this experience has shown me you never know how much love is inside of you, how much love you have to give, and how loved you are until the day you launch."

What utter twaddle.

The saddest part is realising that humanity is tipping in the wrong direction. Space has moved from noble idealism and common endeavour to another capitalist plunder chest wearing a designer cobalt blue bodysuit.

This kind of performative wokeness is remarkably dated. Even in today's post-truth, check-your-privilege-tone-deaf hypocrisy, the flight's environmental cost, exclusivity, and self-congratulations cannot seriously be packaged as a successful blow for equality and feminism. For Perry, the mission presumably held the appeal of generating some fresh headlines after the poorly received Woman's World.

Maybe all this is what we can expect in an age when the U.S. president is a formally convicted felon. The truth is whatever he deigns it to be in whatever populist haze he's in at a given moment. Progress is about the optics of luxury rockets, hair extensions, and designer suits and has nothing to do with policy change, safety, access, and opportunity for women.

The only other all-female crew in human space exploration history was Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, who launched herself into Space in 1963 and became the first woman to do so, orbiting the Earth 48 times.

Tereshkova underwent years of training and spent three full days in Space at an altitude far greater than the 100km mark that Blue Origin's flight surpassed. Since Tereshkova's mission, women have made up just shy of 15 per cent of the 700 people who have been to Space.

For centuries, space's unattainable nature allowed it to exist as a happy exercise in idealism. As a final frontier, space should unify humanity to overcome today's bleak awfulness, vanity, and self-destruction and achieve something akin to Gene Roddenberry's vision of a better tomorrow as seen in Star Trek.

The only way to accomplish that is to put space exploration back into the hands of professionals. If celebrities want to do anything in the meantime, they can use their status and wealth to affect meaningful outcomes here on Earth. Katy Perry, you are no firework.