Space Tourism: Katy Perry Did It for the Gram
What a short, strange press trip it's been.
Three weeks ago, six women of varying occupations shot up into space together on a craft owned and operated by Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’ space exploration company. The group included Aisha Bowe, a former NASA rocket scientist, Amanda Nguyen, a scientist and activist, and Kerianne Flynn, a wealthy woman who sometimes funds films. But as might be expected, the bulk of the attention went to the celebrities: pop star Katy Perry, morning show anchor and Oprah BFF Gayle King, and Lauren Sánchez, a tech-WAG—and specifically, the fiancé of Bezos. This wasn’t the first private space flight to carry laypeople, but it was the first to garner zeitgeist-y attention and media coverage. In this way and despite being badly received by the public, it played out as intended and soft-launched a new frontier of the travel industry.
Several companies in addition to Blue Origin currently trade in space tourism. There’s Elon Musk’s SpaceX, Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, and Axiom Space, which has taken civilians all the way to the International Space Station. These companies are holding their pricing close to their chests, but tickets are said to range from $500,000 per person for the type of quick up-and-down ride the six women went on to hundreds of millions for trips going into orbit or the space station. Eventually, prices will come down far enough for mere wealthy people to afford their own once-in-a-lifetime space vacations, and the race is already on to corner what will soon grow into a $6 billion market.
Despite claims to the contrary, which we’ll get to in a minute, the all-female space flight was tourism promotion. It was a classic press trip that produced an influencer campaign and “earned media,” or coverage that isn’t directly paid for. Blue Origin admits that some of the “crew” flew for free, although it declined to state which passengers specifically. I don’t know the details of their finances, but of the four who potentially have the financial capacity to pay their own way, one anchors a morning show on which the whole thing featured heavily (earned media), one is an international pop star who posted about the flight to her 200 million followers (influencer campaign), one is the fiancé of the guy who owns the spaceship and the person who apparently handpicked her co-passengers, and one is a socialite who also produces films. I’d wager that none of their trips was preceded by the purchasing of a ticket.