All-tourism: Bezos shoots Katy Perry and her own partner into space

The partner of multi -illiarche Bezos briefly flies into space with pop star Katy Perry – with Bezos’ rocket. What sounds like the beginning of an average joke has now happened in America. In the live stream, the astronauts of the exclusively female crew were heard and celebrated at over 100 kilometers. One person on board seemed to scream: “We are in space!”

In minutes at 105 kilometers

The “New Shepard” brought Perry and Lauren Sánchez together with US presenter Gayle King, the scientists Aisha Bowe and Amanda Nguyen and the entrepreneur Kerianne Flynn to a maximum height of 105 kilometers above Earth. After only 10:22 minutes, the capsule of the Blue Origin space company put back on earth safely. The top speed on the way to space was about 3,600 kilometers per hour.

“I dreamed for 15 years that I was flying into space,” wrote Perry (“Firework”, “Roar”, “I Kissed a Girl”) before the start. She also announced that she wanted to sing in weightlessness – after landing it became clear that the 40 -year -old actually performed some lines of the hits “What a Wonderful World” in space.

Kiss for the desert floor

She had previously covered Louis Armstrong’s song at concerts. “I had no idea that one day I would decide to sing a little bit of it in space,” said Perry. After landing, she knelt on the desert floor and kissed the sand.

After the successful landing, Bezos personally opened the hatch of the space capsule. Sánchez described her view of the earth from space as follows: “It was calm, but at the same time very lively. And you look at it and think: We are all in a boat. This is all that I can think about: we are more connected than you think.” Lauren Sánchez designed the blue spatial suits of the Mission NS-31 in cooperation with the New York fashion label Monse.

The rocket starts in the Texas desert near Van Horn and largely flies automatically. Blue Origin has been offering the short trips for space tourists for several years. Before the current start, ten of these trips had already been successfully completed, according to the information there were a total of 52 people.

At the first flight in 2021, founder Bezos himself was on board. Other private space companies – such as Virgin Galactic from the British entrepreneur Richard Branson or SpaceX from Tech billionaire Elon Musk – have similar offers.

Officially, Blue Origin does not provide any information about the price of the trips. Estimates are several hundred thousand dollars. Again and again the company also took celebrities as guests of honor for PR purposes – for example, the Canadian actor William Shatner, who became world famous with his role as Captain Kirk in “Star Trek”.

Comedian Pete Davidson canceled a flight planned in 2022. This time you can also assume that not all participants have paid, at least not the full price.

There had been mass criticism before the start. The US actress Olivia Munn last said in a TV interview that there are just so many more important things in the world. The whole thing seems “insatiable” to her.

Many scientists have been criticizing space tourism for a long time, especially for climate stations. Each rocket launch represents a burden on the environment, for example, said Europe’s former space manager Jan Wörner recently in the RBB24 Inforadio.