Katy Perry and the wealthy women of space

In April, pop star Katy Perry blasted off with the “taking up space” tour, organized by Jeff Bezos’s second wife, Lauren Sanchez. Perry, Sanchez, and four other women traveled 66 miles above the Earth’s surface in a Blue Origin rocket on the NS-31 Mission. No other astronautic venture has sent only women into microgravity since the solo flight of Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova in 1963. The women vigorously promoted this supposedly historic “all-female” trip, but no one was fooled by this guise of historicity. The 11-minute ride made no one an astronaut; it merely marked the growing distance between the space tourism class and the rest of us.

A month later, Trump’s Big Ugly Bill passed. Trump’s budget cuts funding for lunch at public schools and other SNAP programs, continues to imperil nonprofit and public institutions, and reduces the number of people eligible to receive Medicaid and Medicare. A joint study from the University of Pennsylvania and the Yale School of Public Health found that the particular cuts to public healthcare proposed in the bill would result in more than 51,000 deaths annually. The bill also subsidizes mega corporations’ private jet expenses and R&D costs, directly benefiting the billionaire business class. In other words, Jeff Bezos and his ilk have been and will be enriched by Trump’s bill while thousands die of hunger and preventable illness.

Weighed alongside these social concerns, that joyride through space felt particularly sickening. Though Blue Origin has not publicized the cost of a ticket, a similar 2023 trip with competitor Virgin Galactic cost passengers $450,000. For the majority of Americans, $450,000 is an impossible amount of money. A lump sum that substantial would change my life. Certainly, 99.9% of Americans would not consider nearly half a million dollars discretionary spending money.