“If you had told me I'd be part of the first all-female crew in space… I would have believed you”: Katy Perry is going to be blasted into space as part of an all-female Jeff Bezos rocket crew

Yes, we’ll get it over with early. The ‘Like A Firework’ (ex) hitmaker is going to ‘make us go oh, oh, oh as [she] shoots across the sky’. Blame/thank Jeff Bezos as, after sending a hapless 90-year-old William Shatner into space in 2021, his Galaxy Quest for seemingly random celebrity bums-on-rocket-seats continues unabated.

Now – despite both war and famine still going strong – we have Katy Perry lining up as part of a six-astronaut, all-woman crew on the next jaunt for his Amazon-fuelled Blue Origin spacecraft.

Perry will be joined in the hotseats by CBS Morning’s co-host Gayle King, civil rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize nominee Amanda Nguyen, and Bezos’ own girlfriend Lauren Sanchez, who, as part of her ongoing Bezos-financed transformation is now manifesting herself as a starship commander, being the person responsible for ‘putting the mission together’.

We’ve all wanted to fire our nearest and dearest into orbit at one point or another, but Bezos is the only man that can do it for real, and when he’s not making the politically inert staff of the Washington Post quit in disgust at his late-in-the-day Trump about-turn, he’s coming up with pointless stunts like this.

Can anyone fly this thing?

Sanchez’s trusty team of rank amateurs will be rounded out by film producer Kerianne Flynn, the maker of 2018’s gender inequality exploration This Changes Everything and – mercifully – NASA rocket scientist Aisha Bowe. So at least one person will have read the instruction manual.

Their mission will be the first all-female space mission since Russia’s Valentina Tereshkova orbited Earth in 1963. But, by flying solo, she was kind of cheating.

Next stop… Nowhere

The crew's vital mission will last an entire ten whole minutes, effectively being the hi-tech equivalent of a ride on the waltzers by being both equally short-lived and ultimately pointless.

At least with Sir Richard Branson’s comparatively stone-age ‘tiny plane strapped to a bigger one’ Virgin Galactic set-up, occupants get to spin it out a bit with a trip lasting two hours to earn your six minutes of weightlessness.

However, all importantly for Bezos’s, Musk’s and Branson’s egos, Virgin’s Galactic flights do not cross the Karman line, the human-imposed boundary at 100 km above the earth, that has been designated the start of space. Something both Bezos’s and Musk’s toys ace easily.

And in theory, after having previously launched a successful, full earth-orbiting uncrewed mission – something Musk is yet to achieve – after blasting off from the famous Cape Canaveral launch pad in Florida, home to NASA’s moon missions, Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket with Perry and crew strapped on top could just keep going, into orbit… And beyond…

Though don’t get your hopes up.

Instead, after crossing the Karman Line and granting the occupants three minutes of weightlessness, the capsule will splash down in the Gulf of Mexico with the New Shepard rocket making a controlled landing 3.2km north of its departure point.

"If you had told me I'd be part of the first all-female crew in space, I would have believed you,” revealed a disappointingly, though predictably robotic Perry to Newsweek. “Nothing was beyond my imagination as a child.”

Meanwhile, upon his return to Earth post vital Bezos mission, Shatner, struck by the aimless void of space wrote in his autobiography: “Everything I had thought was wrong. Everything I had expected to see was wrong. My trip to space was supposed to be a celebration; instead, it felt like a funeral.”

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