Katy Perry Went to Space. So What? – The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator

Ten minutes and 21 seconds. That’s how long Katy Perry and her all-female crew of self-proclaimed “astronauts” spent in the air during their trip to outer space. Despite the fact that the trip took as much time as it takes me to brew a cup of coffee, these women felt obligated to hold a press conference about it and turn it into a multi-hour livestream. 

The stunt was — the internet concluded — cheesy and tasteless. 

Maybe it was the moment Perry started singing “What a Wonderful World” (Gayle King clarified that the reason Perry chose Louis Armstrong’s beloved hit rather than one of her own songs was because the moment “wasn’t about” her), or the moment she kissed the earth on her return and told reporters that being an “astronaut” had taught her “how much love you have to give and how loved you are.” 

Maybe it was when Lauren Sánchez, Jeff Bezos’s girlfriend, decided to take a stuffed animal, based on a character in her children’s book, with her; or perhaps it was Gayle King’s passionate assertion that “I am so proud of me.” 

More probably it wasn’t a single moment. Instead, it was the fact that the six women who climbed aboard Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin rocket wearing designer space suits seem to think their stunt was somehow historically important. (They did manage to recognize that Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova beat them to being the first “all-female crew” when she solo-orbited the globe 48 times in 1963.) Typically, “making the history books,” especially when it pertains to science, exploration, or discovery, involves doing difficult things. 

For instance, Alan Shepard spent hundreds of hours in simulators over the course of two years to spend 15 minutes in sub-orbital flight to prove a point to the Soviets in 1961; he made the history books because no one was sure the Americans could put a man in space. Neil Armstrong became part of NASA’s astronaut program seven years before he set foot on the moon; he made the history books because getting to the moon was something few people thought possible.

More recently, Sunita Williams and Barry Wilmore (the two astronauts who got stranded in space for nine months and were recently returned to Earth via a SpaceX flight), have, between the two of them, over a thousand hours in space, not to mention thousands of hours in test aircraft. They are, without a doubt, not exactly newbies, although they likely won’t make history books.

Short of Perry’s attempt to understand string theory, it’s not clear that these six women did much of anything trying to get to space, much less acquire the threshold of qualifications we typically associate with astronauts. They were, to put it simply, space tourists on a ride whose mission was to market weightlessness from a self-piloting capsule that required no technical expertise on the part of the crew. (Sánchez said that she chose the crew because of their abilities to be “storytellers” the moment the crew made it back to Earth). 

Even the Left didn’t quite buy the line that Monday’s flight represented some female accomplishment of historic proportions. The New York Times mused pessimistically,  “If the flight proves anything, it’s that women are now free to enjoy capitalism’s most decadent spoils alongside the world’s wealthiest men.” Slate wryly observed that “Hawking space travel for rich people at a time like this, and what’s more, trying to sell it as feminist, has not gone over well.” 

Perry, Amanda Nguyen, Sánchez, King, Aisha Bowe, and Kerianne Flynn have been made a laughing stock rather than feminist icons because no one sees their mission to space as a real accomplishment. But the question the New York Times and Slate aren’t asking themselves is whether or not an all-female crew of astronauts should be considered an accomplishment.

For the sake of argument, let’s suppose Monday’s flight was composed of six female astronauts who had been in the field for years and that their mission was something serious. Should we laud that crew for their bravery in standing up to the patriarchy? No.

It’s not that women can’t go to space or that an all-women team shouldn’t be allowed to crew a space mission. No one in the modern age (with the exception of some fringe commentators) thinks that women can’t embark on the kinds of careers that put them into outer space as fully qualified astronauts. At this point in time, it’s mundane to assign women to routine missions and there’s rarely a fuss about it— and that’s the point. There’s no guts required to “stand up to the patriarchy” in our age. 

Outer space is, for women, a conquered frontier. At this point, women who don’t recognize that only succeed in embarrassing themselves.