So the singer Katy Perry and a group of female ‘celebrities’ who I’ve never heard of have taken a vanity trip to the edge of space on one of Jeff Bezos’s spacecraft. This ‘mission’ which was only in space for 11 minutes is little more than a PR stunt for Bezos the owner of the Amazon conglomerate.
Personally when I saw the line up of passengers, they were certainly not ‘crew’ as the spaceship was 100% remotely piloted, my first thought was not ‘what a great boost for space tourism’ but instead was of the ‘B’ Ark from Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy by the late great Douglas Adams. In Mr Adams book the ‘B’ Ark was a spacecraft filled to the gills with a planet’s more useless and parasitical workers and I can’t think of any group more deserving of the term parasites than this group of over paid and over celebrated ‘celebrities’. The only difference (sadly) is that this group of ‘celebrities’ returned to Earth rather than being sent out to discover and possibly ruin, strange new worlds where they can piss off people all over again.
The media coverage of this trip has been utterly nauseous and has focused on the all female nature of the passengers. I don’t see what is to celebrate about this group of passengers after all they’ve done nothing to be celebrated for. They’ve not piloted the craft nor monitored its systems nor been equipped with the skills to deal with any of the multitude of potentially lethal emergencies of which space has plenty. The only training that they’ve appeared to have are medical checks to ensure that they won’t kick the bucket at some point in the flight. They’ve accomplished nothing at all of any worth apart from garnering some positive PR for Mr Bezos’s spacecraft company from the West’s increasingly supine and cowardly mainstream media. The passengers on this spacecraft were not ‘crew’ in any meaningful sense of the word, in fact they were no more ‘crew’ than I would be considered as crew if I was a passenger on an Easyjet flight to Benidorm.
This pleasure cruise has been touted by the mainstream media as a great advance for women in spaceflight. What an utter pile of steaming festering bollocks. There are many more women who’ve worked to achieve manned and unmanned spaceflight and who have flown into space who are far more worthy of accolades than a few women celebrities. The women crew who have travelled on and sometime died on spacecraft flights, the first woman in space Valentina Tereshkova and the many women who worked on software, navigation and engineering for missions such as Apollo are far more worthy of adulation than a bunch of rich and sometimes vacuous ‘celebrities’.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all in favour of space tourism, money earned from it could go towards both space science and further commercialisation of space which must ultimately be part of the future of humanity if humanity is to survive in the extreme long term. However let’s not be dishonest about this ‘celebrity’ space flight it was a pleasure flight and nothing more than that. In a way it is little different from the pleasure flights you could get from fairs in the United States in the early and very unregulated days of aviation. This was not a ‘mission’ nor were the passengers ‘crew’ and I believe that it is extremely dishonest of mainstream media outlets to give the impression that this trip was more than it was.