I’m Just Saying: Katy Perry’s 10-Minute Space Hop Is the Most Useless Flex of 2025

I’m a normal person. My grocery bill keeps going up, my rent is brutal, and I have never even flown business class.

So forgive me if I roll my eyes when a bunch of rich folks — including Katy Perry — blow hundreds of thousands of dollars to ride a rocket for ten minutes and then call it “historic.”

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What actually happened?

• Blue Origin’s NS-31 rocket took off on 14 April 2025, shot six famous women 62 miles up, let them float for four minutes, and dropped them right back in West Texas.

• Past seats on this same rocket have sold for US $28 million; more recent tickets land somewhere between $450 000 and $5 million. The company won’t say who paid and who rode free.

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Why the “inspiration” line feels like a slap in the face

1. Girls don’t need a pop-star joy-ride to love science.

Take the ticket money and fund coding clubs, lab grants, or college scholarships. One $450 000 seat could pay four full years of tuition for 70 engineering students at a public university.

2. Real astronauts work for it.

NASA crews spend years in school, rack up jet-pilot hours, and do brutal survival drills. Katy Perry did two days in a simulator and a selfie in a silver flight suit. That’s tourism, not exploration.

3. The planet pays the carbon bill.

A single New Shepard launch dumps roughly 5 — 15 tons of CO₂ per passenger, depending on whose math you use — about what the average person emits in a whole year. . And no, saying “the engine only burns hydrogen” doesn’t erase the upstream pollution needed to make that fuel.

4. Opportunity cost is huge.

For the price of one celebrity joy-seat you could:

• Stock a big-city food bank for an entire year.

• Buy 40 000 cheap laptops for kids who still have none.

• Launch a small satellite that actually measures climate change.

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“It’s their money, let them live!”

Sure. But regular people are allowed to be annoyed when mega-millionaires treat space like a VIP lounge while we’re clipping coupons. If private spaceflight wants respect, it should carry real experiments, teachers, maybe disaster-response gear — not influencers looking for a new profile pic.

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My take

Call me when a mission does something useful: grows medicine in zero-G, repairs a telescope, or puts student projects on board. Until then, Katy Perry’s sub-orbital sing-along is just the world’s most expensive roller-coaster ride — and the rest of us are right to side-eye every second of it.