The Katy Perry/Gayle King Space Trip
Recently, I found myself pulled into the conversation surrounding Katy Perry and Gayle King’s trip to space. The backlash was immediate and widespread criticism of the promotional tone, questions around privilege, and commentary on what felt like performative feminism. And I’ll admit, I wasn’t impressed either. Something about it felt… off. Entitled, maybe. It did come off as very tone-deaf to me. Although, I really don’t think that they meant it to be that way.
It made me think back to William Shatner’s spaceflight in 2021. It was a similar kind of trip, but it didn’t provoke nearly the same reaction. Maybe because it felt quieter, more personal. It seemed like something he simply wanted to do for himself and when he returned, he spoke about it in a way that was reflective and moving. There were no flashing lights or Instagram reels. Just awe.
Despite my feelings about the Perry/King mission, I’ve always been a supporter of space exploration. But this incident stirred something deeper in me. It brought back memories from my early 30s, when I became fascinated with the Cold War space race. I’d spend time with people, 3 people, who had lived through that era. We would watch old Apollo mission footage from the ’60s; hours of grainy, methodical engineering updates and slow-moving lunar visuals that would bore most modern viewers into a coma. But for me, it was captivating.
I was enthralled by the sheer will of it all. It wasn’t war in the traditional sense. It was a new kind of battle: a competition of minds, of technological reach, of who could rise the highest. There was always a tension underneath, of course, a bomb could fall at any second. That was an on-going topic in those days. But still, it felt like a shift. A different way of doing conflict.
Now in my 40s, I’m more aware of the noise that surrounds those moments. The flood of conspiracy theories, the clips that circulate claiming it was all staged. That maybe none of it happened. That maybe it was all filmed in a studio. There are even whispers of Buzz Aldrin himself hinting the moon landings as being faked….though I’m unsure whether those comments have been misunderstood or misrepresented.
It hurts to even entertain the possibility of the moon landings being stage. I wished I had been born in that time. And even now, after all the doubts, I still believe some part of it was true. Maybe not every claim. Maybe not the moon landing itself. I do believe though, that we really did send people into space. That humans truly left Earth’s orbit, looked back, and got a different, broader perspective of planet earth.
The Apollo 8 mission is my favorite and moved me the most. On Christmas Eve 1968, as the spacecraft orbited the moon, astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders read aloud from the Book of Genesis. Nearly one billion people were listening. It was the most-watched broadcast at the time. Three voices, floating in silence, reading ancient words while looking back at the Earth rising in the distance.
I’m not religious. I don’t identify with Christianity, and I don’t even agree with the first line of Genesis, “In the beginning” as being a correct translation. The translation “When Giod Began” seems to make more sense to me, but that is for another discussion. But watching the replay of that Apollo Mission, I felt something. And I’m grateful I got to share that feeling with friends who had been alive then and who helped me understand what it may have been like to live through such a pivotal time in history.
So, when I circle back to my criticism of the Perry/King mission, the performative nature, the Instagram noise, the way it all felt a bit like branding…I also recognize something important. It reminded me of a special time in my life where I got to look back in a particular time in history where innovation was happening and where disputes were handled a little bit differently.
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