Katy Perry Is Going To Space
NBC - Gayle King, Katy Perry and Lauren Sánchez will join three other women on the next mission from Jeff Bezos' rocket company, Blue Origin announced on Thursday.
The 11th crewed flight of the company's New Shepard rocket is set to blast off this spring, it said, though Blue Origin did not give a date.
King, cohost of "CBS Mornings"; Sanchez, Bezos' girlfriend; and Perry, a popstar, will fly alongside former NASA rocket scientist Aisha Bowe, bioastronautics research scientist Amanda Nguyen and movie producer Kerianne Flynn to round out the all-female crew of six.
Clearly I have been living under a rock, because I was unaware quite how easy it was to get to catch a flight to outer space. If you have enough money, or are friends with the right people, you can grab yourself a seat on Jeff Bezos' giant penis-shaped rocket that travels three times the speed of sound, takes you 65 miles above earth, passes over the "internationally recognized boundary of space", and makes you real life astronaut. You can float around and experience weightless for a few minutes. You get look out the window and see the curvature of the earth. Then they quickly deploy some parachutes and you safely float back down to earth.
The whole mission takes 11-minutes. And all the preparation you need is a couple days in an on-site astronaut training program. A program that basically anybody with a pulse can do, considering that a 90-year old William Shatner was able to do it in 2021. Who's only qualifications were captaining a fictional space ship on a TV show in the 60's (and a handful of movies afterwards). Fun fact: William Shatner's trip to outer space on Jeff Bezos' penis rocket actually caused him a brief crisis. After the trip was over, Shatner said being in outer space caused him, "One of the strongest feelings of grief I've ever experienced", that it, "felt like a funeral" and "all I saw was death".
"I love the mystery of the universe. I love all the questions that have come to us over thousands of years of exploration and hypotheses... all of that has thrilled me for years... but when I
looked in the opposite direction, into space, there was no mystery, no majestic awe to behold ... all I saw was death.
"It was among the strongest feelings of grief I have ever encountered. The contrast between the vicious coldness of space and the warm nurturing of Earth below filled me with overwhelming sadness. Every day, we are confronted with the knowledge of further destruction of Earth at our hands: the extinction of animal species, of flora and fauna ... things that took five billion years to evolve, and suddenly we will never see them again because of the interference of mankind. It filled me with dread. My trip to space was supposed to be a celebration; instead, it felt like a funeral." - William Shatner
Jesus... good luck with that Katy Perry. But congratulations on becoming a real life astronaut. Along with Jeff Bezos' large breasted fiancee Lauren Sanchez, and host of CBS Mornings, Gayle King. This makes me think if I put my mind to it, I could travel to space myself some day. It's just a matter of money and/or connections. And at this rate, 50 years from now, taking an 11-minute trip to the edge of the earth might cost nothing more than two tickets at a carnival. Some one arm man with a pony tail beard and a permanently lit cigarette stuck to his bottom lip will strap you into a rocket, pull a lever, and blast you into outer space from the Texas State Fair.
No offense to Katy Perry, Jeff Bezos' large breasted fiancee, Gayle King, and 90-year old Captain Kirk, but if they can safely go space traveling, that makes me think I could be fit to walk on the moon some day. I suppose Elon Musk did once say he was going to colonize Mars with a group of civilians someday. And I'm pretty sure the only qualification for that trip is to hate your life on Earth enough that you're willing to spend your remaining years in vicious coldness surrounded by death. I'm sure I could get there.
Going to space used to feel like such an incredible feat. There's people out there who've dedicated their whole lives working for the privilege to do so. I'd imagine that's a tough pill to swallow for some watching Katy Perry get the nod. They probably spent their whole lives studying engineering, or whatever crazy shit you have to do to get hired by NASA. If only they spent their time climbing the ladder at Amazon and getting an in with Jeff Bezos instead. Or invested early in bitcoin. Or done any job at all that netted them a few hundred thousand dollars in savings. It could have been so easy.