Update: Blast off! Perry, King et al. have officially been to space. The newly minted astronauts landed safely back on Earth. “This was not a ride. This was a bona fide freakin’ flight,” Gayle King said after the journey. “I’m so proud of me right now. I still can’t believe it.”
“To me, it’s such a reminder of how we need to do better… be better human beings,” she added.
For Perry, the flight made her feel “super connected to love.” The pop star sang a bit of “What A Wonderful World” upon the crew’s descent. When asked why, she answered, “It’s not about me. It’s not about singing my songs. It’s about a collective energy in there. It’s about us. It’s about making space for future women, and taking up space, and belonging, and it’s about this wonderful world that we see right out there and appreciating it. This is all for the benefit of Earth.”
Original story: Katy Perry and Gayle King are going to a whole ‘nother world, a different dimension. You may have thought the initial headlines about Perry and King’s space flight were a pre-emptive April Fool’s joke or a bizarre album promo or anything other than a real, actual news story, but the stunt is very much happening and it’s happening today.
The two women join Emmy-winning journalist and Jeff Bezos’ fiancé Lauren Sánchez, former NASA rocket scientist Aisha Bowe, civil rights activist Amanda Nguyen, and This Changes Everything producer Kerianne Flynn on Blue Origin’s all-female space flight, which will take them to the edge of space to experience weightlessness for a few minutes. Sorry to the astronauts on the ISS, who will have to wait a little bit longer for a galactic Katy Perry concert.
In an interview with Associated Pressabout the launch, Perry said she was looking inward to the “feminine divine that I was born with and definitely unlocked when I had my daughter even more” to help her mentally prepare for the flight. “I was listening to Cosmos by Carl Sagan and reading a book on string theory,” the pop star recalled. “I’ve always been interested in astrophysics and interested in astronomy and astrology and the stars. We are all made of stardust and we all come from the stars.” It may be a woman’s world, but it’s about to be a woman’s universe as well.
