Those of you who like to forget middling pop singers once they’ve outlasted their relevance were probably somewhat piqued this past week as you were forced to remember who Katy Perry was.
I know I was a bit miffed; here I’d vacated the very small part of my brain that was dedicated to memorizing the hook to “Teenage Dream” or questioning why “California Gurls” [sic] weren’t just “fine, fresh [and] fierce,” to quote the 2010 song of the same name by Perry, but also “undeniable.”
I’ve talked with numerous Californians both before and after the song was released, and nobody’s ever given me a variation of this argument: “Oh, don’t you tell me there are any females in our state, no matter what that dumb woman says: It’s totally deniable! Y chromosomes as far as the eye can see, and I don’t want to hear a peep otherwise!” This didn’t seem like a problem that needed to be addressed, in other words.
But alas, that space in my poor brain is re-occupied now we’re forced to contend with the fact that Perry, 40, is in the news again for becoming an “astronaut” — thanks to the fact that her acquaintance’s boyfriend just happens to have a cool rocket to ride on.
Perry was one of the six women aboard a Blue Origin space tourist flight that lasted 11 minutes and was hailed as the first all-female crew in the final frontier.
While Perry was the most famous — and fatuous — of the “astronauts” aboard the New Shepard spacecraft, there were also Gayle King (CBS anchor), Lauren Sánchez (Jeff Bezos’ squeeze), Kerianne Flynn (don’t care), Aisha Bowe (don’t care), and Amanda Nguyễn (also don’t care).
Blue Origin, Bezos’ third-rate SpaceX competitor, hailed this as a major milestone and hyped it up in the media. Unfortunately, it wasn’t just us laughing at Perry and Co. because of their ridiculousness, but the Trump administration made sure everyone knew that, while Blue Origin was calling the crew “astronauts” in social media posts like this, they had to use very heavy air-quotes around that word:
We just completed our 11th human spaceflight and the 31st flight of the New Shepard program. The astronaut crew included Aisha Bowe, Amanda Nguyễn, Gayle King, Katy Perry, Kerianne Flynn, and Lauren Sánchez.
To date, New Shepard has flown 58 people to space. Read more:… pic.twitter.com/Qglt1p1Wc2
— Blue Origin (@blueorigin) April 14, 2025
Is Katy Perry an astronaut?
But first, for everyone who missed this and was wondering why it was so fatuous, please let Perry explain it for me:
Katy Perry says “I really feel connected to that strong divine feminine” after Blue Origin space flight pic.twitter.com/4vVqv3QqIW
— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) April 14, 2025
Yes, she was connected to the “strong divine feminine” in a way that meditation and the Hoffman Process (a type of woo-tastic intensive residential therapy that incorporates Eastern mysticism, gestalt psychology and group counseling in a format that makes Esalen look practically scientific, for those of you wondering) didn’t bring her.
All for the low, low price of hundreds of thousands of dollars per ride, plus an estimated 50 tons of indirect CO2 emissions before the spacecraft even left the pad.
Couldn’t she have just tried ayahuasca instead?
Needless to say, the derision was immediate and swift — something Gayle King got irked about, saying that it diminished what the crew accomplished by calling it just “a ride”:
Gayle King thinks she’s an astronaut because she took a 10 minute ride on her friend’s boyfriend’s rocket ship
— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) April 16, 2025
However, as Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy pointed out, yeah, this kind of was a ride — which is why they weren’t really astronauts:
The U.S. commercial space industry is an inspiring project which showcases American ingenuity and exceptionalism. But the last FAA guidelines under the Commercial Space Astronaut Wings Program were clear: Crewmembers who travel into space must have “demonstrated activities during… https://t.co/n2DxpNh4Hy
— Secretary Sean Duffy (@SecDuffy) April 17, 2025
“The U.S. commercial space industry is an inspiring project which showcases American ingenuity and exceptionalism,” he wrote in a Thursday post.
“But the last FAA guidelines under the Commercial Space Astronaut Wings Program were clear: Crewmembers who travel into space must have ‘demonstrated activities during flight that were essential to public safety, or contributed to human space flight safety.’
“The crew who flew to space this week on an automated flight by Blue Origin were brave and glam, but you cannot identify as an astronaut. They do not meet the FAA astronaut criteria.”
In other words, to be an astronaut, you have to have done some part in either piloting the craft or doing research there, in addition to a lifetime of work and training. Visiting space makes you an astronaut in the same way that walking through a hospital makes you a doctor. Getting connected to the “strong divine feminine” also doesn’t count, alas.
It’s a cool story, I suppose, even if I still haven’t gotten an answer on why “California Gurls” were “deniable” by anybody. But these were six women who went on one of the coolest rides on this amusement park we call Earth and lived to tell about it.
Astronauts, though, not so much.
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