Ah, outer space. The final frontier. The edge of the modern map. Inscrutable darkness. Men and – very importantly and more relevantly here – women have craned their necks and gazed upwards for as long as they’ve had eyes to see, and wondered. It is a pull that, I suspect, a great many continue to feel today, which is why NASA, SpaceX and everyone else with the capacity to launch a rocket into the unknown continue to captivate us decades into the ‘space age’. It truly doesn’t get old.
Which is what made the coverage of yesterday’s all-female Blue Origin ‘expedition’ so puzzling to me. Or rather, the effect the images had on me so puzzling. Because far from feeling wonder, or inspiration, or admiration, I felt drained as I watched the botoxed faces block out the earth as they filled the capsule’s camera, and exhausted as I heard them voice cereal-box platitudes after experiencing something so profound.
Some necessary context, for those who spend less time reading news than yours truly: Yesterday, six women boarded Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket, in what was apparently the first all-female flight since 1963. The passengers included Bezos’s fiancée, Lauren Sánchez, popstar Katy Perry, broadcaster Gayle King, activist Amanda Nguyen, engineer Aisha Bowe and film producer Kerianne Flynn.
They blasted off from Texas and before too long, arrived in low-earth orbit, where they proceeded to – based on the footage – spend as much time looking at the camera as out the windows. Nevertheless, based on the teary eyes looking into that camera and the one-time exclamation of what sounded like a new-agey ‘Oh my goddess’, it was for the astro-nots a transformative experience.
Not too transformative, though, because it didn’t do all that much to put them in greater touch with reality, I realised as I read Katy Perry’s post-flight comment, to the effect that she “couldn’t recommend this experience more”.
I’m sure that had readers flocking to book tickets on the next Blue Origin flight.
Which, I think, gets to the heart of what put this particular flight out of step with all of the other high-profile voyages over the years: despite the all-encompassing reach of their celestial proclamations and subsequent reflections, it was quite clearly an exclusive venture. One small step for Lauren Sanchez and Katy Perry, no step at all for mankind.
Whatever you think of Elon Musk and his politics, SpaceX has continued in that great tradition of pushing the boundary of what’s possible, technologically and – without getting overly poetic – humanly. In that, they’re imitating the captivating NASA missions of old, that possessed such force as to compel multiple generations of families from across the world to gather around TVs and radios together to see what humankind had never accomplished before. These were conquests everyone celebrated, that everyone felt they had a stake in.
Not so here. This had all the markings of Coachella, for those for whom actual Coachella has already lost its lustre.
That it was cloaked in high and aspirational language didn’t help. The passengers were repeatedly referred to as “astronauts,” the flight often called a “mission” and the participants asked afterwards for their insights and reflections as though they’d ascended Sinai and spoken with God himself. It was not, in the manner of so many touristic space flights, a private venture. It was a 100-kilometre high platform for some already high profiles.
I don’t normally join the chorus of voices decrying the activities and exploits of the rich and famous, but the 31st flight of the New Shepard programme seems to make doing so unavoidable. Those critics – it seems to me – are often motivated by a powerless envy, but here I think it’s possible to argue fairly dispassionately that there’s no faster way to make people lose interest in human spaceflight than extending the Instagram-impulse into the great beyond.
In doing so, you lose in a fractious age one of the few remaining unifiers we have. Because honestly, what else are people supposed to take from Katy Perry using up some of their precious oxygen and time to sing Louis Armstrong’s What a Wonderful World, only to say upon landing that “it’s not about me or about me singing my songs” or Gayle King’s moralising reminder gleaned from the heavens that people needed to “do better and be better” on Earth.
The leftist’s thesaurus stands before me on occasions like these, with all the tempting power of the One Ring, suggesting words like “privilege” and “social hierarchy” that normally set my teeth on edge.
“I feel super connected to love,” Ms Perry said shortly after exiting the capsule yesterday, adding, “I think this experience has shown me you never know how much love is inside of you, like how much love you have to give and how loved you are, until the day of launch”.
I guess I, and likely you, dear reader, will never know how much love is inside you, then, given that we’re unlikely to see a day of launch anytime soon. That’s the domain of the botoxed and beautiful, who have access to a billionaire to blast them into space on an unavoidably phallic rocket (see the New Shepard rocket in the tweet below and tell me I’m wrong).
No, the final frontier isn’t so much at risk of being conquered as of being disenchanted. A few more flights like this and it won’t be long before my eyes glaze over every time a rocket takes off. That would be, I think, a terrible thing, and it would be one less mystery, one less adventure, for all of us to feel drawn to.