One can only assume that being completely tone-deaf is part of Blue Origin’s brand strategy. What else can explain choosing Katy Perry to spearhead an all-female flight into space?
Katy Perry has been in a death spiral for years now. A meteoric career that has nosedived through a litany of PR blunders and publicity mistakes. Each desperate bid to stay relevant leaves her looking worse than before. She’s the pop world’s equivalent of Michael Scott — brash behaviours, blissful obliviousness, and the collective eye-roll of the world growing louder with each stunt. And now, this has reached new heights — literally — with this week’s spaceflight.
Look, I’m not a pop culture specialist. I’m not here to simply berate Katy Perry. I’m a brand strategist — and this is about Blue Origin. About how Perry’s crumbling brand has collided disastrously with theirs.
The optics on the flight were already bad. It was billed as the first flight by an all-female crew (technically, Valentina Tereshkova beat them to it solo in 1963). A collective of women were assembled: Amanda Nguyen, Gayle King, Aisha Bowe, and Kerianne Flynn, alongside Lauren Sánchez — Jeff Bezos’ wife and increasingly the de facto face of Blue Origin’s corporate identity — and Katy Perry.
Predictably, Perry stole the show — the reason she was selected. Her name carries PR weight. The problem is it’s not for the right reasons.
Even Elle, covering the flight supportively, pulled this quote from Perry:
“I was like, What am I going to wear?”
That’s the best they could find. It’s also a microcosm of Perry’s broader media presence: a celebrity who has failed to adapt to the 2020s' more nuanced and layered expectations. Where parasocial relationships dominate through long-form platforms like podcasting, and where celebrities are expected to have rich, multi-faceted personal brands. The few who don't have this either possess rare levels of talent — or they fade. Perry’s latest album bombed spectacularly, becoming the lowest-rated album on Metacritic in a decade. She doesn’t have the talent shield to coast anymore.
A Feminist i-con
The attempt to position this flight as a feminist victory is blanched by the particular brand of feminism Perry brings with her — a saccharine, insipid strain that feels like it never evolved past 2010. A feminism that self-congratulates, that leans on words like “empowering” while staying blissfully detached from the realities of feminist discourse today.
The Elle article even devotes a section to “Getting Glammed Up for Their Flight,” where Perry proclaims:
“We are going to put the ‘ass’ in astronaut.”
There’s also debate over whether lash extensions will survive zero gravity.
Meanwhile, the video footage post-flight shows Jeff Bezos hugging the women as they land — a billionaire welcoming back his harem of carefully selected women, heralded as having achieved a feminist milestone, but hollowed out of any real meaning.
All of this unfolds just two days before the UK Supreme Court strips trans women of the legal right to be recognised as women — a reminder that real political issues around feminism and gender are complex, nuanced, and horrendously volatile. A joyride into space by some of the wealthiest cisgender women in the world whilst trans women are told they are not legally recognised as women.
While the world wrestles with complex, difficult questions, Katy Perry’s childlike brand of feminism feels not just outdated, but actively embarrassing.
Brand Astrociation
Blue Origin has been dragged through the mud for this, and rightly so. The only faintly positive coverage came from The Atlantic, which essentially framed the move as hiring a celebrity clown for a superficial stunt.
There are two major issues here.
First – the PR milestone — a genuine all-female spaceflight — was squandered. Stripped of dignity and handed over to Katy Perry’s brand of vapid attention-grabbing. Without her, the flight could have stood as a quiet, meaningful achievement. An opportunity to recognise some of the greatest living feminist icons of our time, known for women’s rights and changing the path of history. Instead, it became a lurid spectacle.
Second — and far bigger — is the brand rot underneath. Space travel has shifted in public perception: from mystifying, heroic exploration to the latest grotesque playground for the super-rich. A hyper-luxury good, wreaking environmental havoc, offering nothing to the common good. The endgame? Billionaires ejecting themselves from Earth after pillaging it.
If you're going to burn rocket fuel and spin it as "for the good of humanity," you'd better have a payload worth it. Blue Origin didn't. They launched six celebrities and billionaires’ wives for a vanity flight, cloaked in the thin veil of feminism.
Blue Origin could have repositioned themselves here. They could have begun repairing their image. Instead, they cemented it: another status symbol for the absurdly wealthy, another tone-deaf spectacle for the rest of us to roll our eyes at.
Maybe that’s the point. Maybe the tone-deafness is deliberate now. In which case, hats off to Blue Origin – Katy Perry is, indeed, the perfect ambassador.
