Allow me, dear reader, to ruminate on the peculiar juxtaposition of Katy Perry’s 11-minute suborbital frolic with the far weightier triumph of SpaceX’s recent rescue of NASA astronauts from the International Space Station—a contrast that lays bare our culture’s odd knack for exalting the trivial while sidelining the profound. On October 23, 2024, Perry, swathed in a bespoke flight suit, soared 62 miles aboard Blue Origin’s New Shepard alongside Gayle King, Lauren Sánchez, Aisha Bowe, Amanda Nguyen, and Kerianne Flynn. For three minutes of weightlessness, she floated, crooned a fragment of “What a Wonderful World,” and marveled at Earth’s arc before descending to a Texas desert, daisy in hand, greeted by Oprah and Kris Jenner. The affair, polished to a high sheen, was over quicker than a podcast intro, yet hailed as a feminist milestone. Meanwhile, SpaceX, under Elon Musk’s aegis, executed a feat of genuine heroism, retrieving astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams from a 286-day ordeal on the ISS, their Boeing Starliner having faltered.

The astronauts’ saga dwarfs Perry’s stunt in scope and stakes. Wilmore and Williams, launched in June 2024 for an eight-day mission, were marooned when Starliner’s propulsion woes forced NASA to return the craft empty. They endured nine months in orbit, their bodies adapting to microgravity, their minds grappling with isolation, while contributing to experiments on plant growth, stem cell therapies, and microbial survival. On March 18, 2025, SpaceX’s Crew Dragon splashed down off Florida, carrying Wilmore, Williams, NASA’s Nick Hague, and Roscosmos’ Aleksandr Gorbunov, ending their protracted stay. This was no joyride but a testament to human resilience and SpaceX’s engineering prowess, hastened—per some accounts—by political pressure from President Trump and Musk’s insistence on prioritizing their return.

Yet, Perry’s three-minute float garnered breathless coverage, her daisy-waving exit a social media darling, while the astronauts’ return, though lauded, was muddied by political squabbles over credit and timing. Why not let Perry linger in orbit through 2025, serenading the cosmos with “Firework,” her glittery charisma a spectacle for the stars? Her brief jaunt, though symbolically potent, one may suppose, pales beside the astronauts’ marathon, their rescue a reminder of what’s possible when ingenuity meets necessity. Perry’s flight was a sparkler; SpaceX’s mission, a supernova. One wishes her post-flight platitudes about “making space” had nodded to Wilmore and Williams, whose quiet fortitude and SpaceX’s intervention truly expanded the human frontier.

N.P.: “Soul Bossanova – 7″ Edit” – Skeewiff