Few things incite a global pile-on as quickly as a group of wealthy, glamorous women being tone-deaf. Like, for example, accepting a free flight into space from a billionaire, touting it as historic female empowerment, then, as pop star Katy Perry said, declaring you are putting "the ass back into astronaut". Ha! (Though when exactly was the ass in astronaut?) All whilst impeccably, laboriously, expensively groomed, winking at cameras.
Lauren Sánchez, journalist and fiancée of the world's second richest man, Jeff Bezos, gathered a clutch of successful, otherwise creditable friends for this charade along with Perry: former NASA rocket scientist Aisha Bowe, film producer Kerianne Flynn, journalist (and best friend of Oprah) Gayle King, and civil rights activist and scientist Amanda Nguyen. On Monday, a particularly phallic-looking rocket from Bezos's tech company Blue Origin shot the women up past the Kármán line — 100 kilometres above the earth, considered to be the threshold of space — for almost 11 minutes of astonishment, and a brief experience of weightlessness, then a return to land in West Texas. Only 11 per cent of astronauts are , so you might consider it a triumph of sorts were it not just simple marketing for Bezos and the weird claims that it might have any impact on any other women in the world.
The headlines were clear: "What's more vacuous than an endless vacuum? It's Lauren Sánchez and Katy Perry's party in space" (The Guardian), "The Perfect Pop S.
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