Katy Perry Shoots for the Stars — Literally: The Pop Icon's Space Adventure Has Everyone Talking

It is one thing to call yourself a pop star. It is another thing entirely to become an actual star — or at least, to visit the place where the stars live. Katy Perry did exactly that in April 2025 when she joined a historic all-female crew aboard Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket for a flight to the edge of space and back.

The crew, which included Lauren Sánchez — Jeff Bezos's partner and former television journalist — CBS This Morning host Gayle King, civil rights activist Amanda Nguyen, aerospace engineer Aisha Bowe, and pilot Kerianne Flynn, made history as an all-female spaceflight. The milestone drew global attention and no shortage of passionate cultural commentary from all directions.

Perry, always one for spectacle, fully leaned into the occasion. She brought a daisy — a nod to her famous floral motifs — to float in zero gravity during the flight, and was seen beaming with undisguised, childlike joy throughout the entire experience. When the capsule landed and the hatch opened, Perry dropped to her knees and kissed the ground in a moment of theatrical emotion that was immediately splashed across every entertainment outlet on the planet.

I want everyone to feel this, she said in post-flight interviews, with an earnestness that seemed to disarm even those who had rolled their eyes at the mission's celebrity-heavy passenger manifest. The flight lasted approximately eleven minutes — enough time to cross the Kármán line at one hundred kilometres above Earth, experience several extraordinary minutes of weightlessness, and return to the Texas desert below.

Not everyone was moved. Critics pointed out that space tourism remains the exclusive playground of the ultra-wealthy, and that the attention lavished on a pop star's brief trip above the atmosphere sits uncomfortably alongside ongoing conversations about climate change and resource inequality. Perry, who has been outspoken on environmental issues, found herself defending the choice to board a fossil fuel-powered rocket — an irony her critics were quick to highlight.

She engaged with it directly, arguing that experiences like this have historically inspired profound shifts in perspective. The overview effect — the cognitive shift that astronauts describe upon seeing Earth from space, small and alone and luminously fragile in the void — is real, widely documented, and, she argued, worth sharing with the world.

Whatever your view on the politics of celebrity space tourism, the image of Katy Perry in a flight suit, eyes wide with wonder as the blue arc of Earth fills the capsule window, is one that will endure. She may only have been up there for eleven minutes. But she came back different — and she made very sure the whole world knew it.