Essay by Eric Worrall
Could this get any sillier?
Why Katy Perry’s celebrity spaceflight blazed a trail for climate breakdown
Published: April 18, 2025 1.41am AEST
Steve Westlake
Lecturer, Environmental Psychology, University of BathWhat’s not to like about an all-female celebrity crew riding a rocket into space? Quite a lot, as it turns out.
Katy Perry and her companions were initially portrayed in the media as breaking down gender barriers. On their return to Earth, the team enthused about protecting the planet and blazing a trail for others. Perry even sang What a Wonderful World during the flight, and kissed the ground on exiting the spacecraft.
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But it’s the negative social effects of this kind of display from celebrities (of any gender) that our research sheds light on. I’m part of a team of social scientists researching the powerful effects of politicians, business leaders and celebrities who lead by example on climate change – or don’t.
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Our findings reveal that when people see public figures behaving like this, they are less willing to make changes to their own lives. “Why should I do my bit for the climate when these celebrities are doing the opposite?” is the question people repeatedly asked in our research.
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Not only does this undermine people’s motivation to make changes, it reduces the credibility of leaders. That in turn makes coordinated climate action less likely, because shifting to a low-carbon society will require public trust in leadership and a sense of collective effort.
Read more: https://theconversation.com/why-katy-perrys-celebrity-spaceflight-blazed-a-trail-for-climate-breakdown-254824
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I don’t know why everyone is picking on Katy. Everyone knows politicians and celebrities routinely ignore the carbon limits they try to impose on the rest of us. My previous Katy article I thought it was mildly amusing that a celebrity climate activist took a space flight, but portraying Katy as an agent of doomsday, “blazing a trail for climate breakdown”, seem a little extreme.
Steve Westlake holds some rather intense views when it comes to climate action. In 2019 Westlake inspired an entire article on why he personally gave up flying, and in 2022 he co-authored a paper in Nature about how scientific civil disobedience helps to spur climate action.
Judith Curry wrote a response to Westlake’s call for scientific climate change civil disobedience in 2022.
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I must be old- never heard of any of these celebrities.
Someone said that if you’re going to send a bunch of women to space in a giant vibrator, you should at least go all the way to Uranus.
Venusian women will be glad to hear that.
I am glad that I am not the only one who thinks that it looks remarkably phallic. My Sunday Sport headline (or National Enquirer in US) would be: “Jeff Bezos takes six women to heaven and back with a giant d*ldo”. Pehaps the whole thing was the world’s most expensive joke all along?
Don’t all rockets look phallic?
If your member looks like an Apollo/Saturn V, see a doctor.
Redge – to some degree, but Blue Origin takes it to another level.
When the russians shot a female (dog) into space they showed at least mercy and put her out of her misery once her task was complete.
A aging hipocrate star desperate for attention, who will put her out of her misery nowadays?
I further wonder what BS they had spun in case that showflight had crashed or spectaculary exploded? (sarc)
Wall to wall mourning of “brave women”.
I think much has been made of this stupid stunt. What momentous things have happened while these poptarts have filled the news?
Shouldn’t that be cupid stunt?
Wow! Two minds in the same gutter, strat. You beat me to it!
Logic… amazing stuff.
A cunning array of stunts?
Credit for* that* goes to William Nealy, author of “Kayaks to Hell”
What momentous things have happened while these poptarts have filled the news?
Good question. One thing I always like to consider: What are they distracting you from?
(emphasis added)
Don’t you love the use of the word ‘any’ rather than the archaic ‘either’?
I believe the UK Supreme Court has put that one to bed…
“BBC’s RuPaul’s Drag Race UK stars are outraged over the Supreme Court in London ruling that — for the purposes of judging matters of equality — terms like “woman” and “sex” refer to biological sex, not one’s so-called “gender identity.””
https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2025/04/18/rupauls-drag-race-uk-stars-melt-down-over-uk-supreme-court-trans-ruling-fk-all-the-way-off/
I guess that means they now have to be called drag kings ! 😉
Drag is the very epitome of “men-pretending-to-be-women” as a disgusting parody and belittlement of the female gender.
Silly tart makes a fool of herself and regrets it at her leisure.
“Before the launch, she declared she was aiming to ‘put the ass into astronaut ’”
Look out Ellen Ripley; she showed us her knickers. But the best banter about the expensive and exclusive Hen Do in space (for a few minutes) was about the rocket itself.
New Shepard, the reusable suborbital rocket system, looks like a dick.
https://www.inverse.com/innovation/why-do-rockets-look-like-penises
Nobody says that about Starship, or any other launch system I can think of..
“Nobody says that about Starship, . . .”
Well, truth be known, I’ve recently heard rumors of a dickhead being associated with Starship.
But Starship looks just like a V2
V2 => and age-related reference. 🤠
Well, there was another total dickhead associated with the V2 . . . but I digress.
The SpaceX Starship vehicle is dissimilar to the World War II V2 rocket in these respects:
— Starship is a second stage/orbital stage; the V2 was a single stage rocket and could not go into Earth orbit, only fly sub-orbital arcs,
— Starship is much larger, with the Bock 2 version having an overall height of about 171 feet; the V2 had an overall height of about 46 feet (see attached to-scale photo comparison),
— Starship has aerodynamic control fins near the nose; the V2 doesn’t have these,
— Starship has heat-resistant black tiles to survive atmospheric reentry (on the side away from the camera in the attached photo); the V2 never used heat tiles,
— Starship has six rocket engines at its wide rear end; the V2 has one at its narrow rear end.
Starship is actually more than twice that size with the first stage having 33 engines as apposed to the V2’s single one. You are just showing the second stage of the fully stacked Starship which, as you say, has 6 engines. My understanding is that the term ‘starship’ can refer to either the second stage you portray or the complete two stage rocket which is a bit confusing.
Musk is a genius, not a dickhead. But maybe he should spend a bit more time these days on Starship rather than politics.
You clearly are confusing the SpaceX Starship launch system (which uses the first-stage booster named “Super Heavy”) and the second stage vehicle named “Starship”. This link will help you out:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship_(spacecraft)
In additional, you obviously missed my direct statement:
“— Starship is a second stage/orbital stage”
Hence, in context, the photo comparison is correct and properly scaled.
I need not comment further on that claim.
His Doge work is the stuff of legends.
Oh, I couldn’t agree more.
In Greek mythology, there is the legend of the god Chaos. Chaos was the nothingness at the beginning of the world. Because early Christians did not understand how to use the word “chaos” properly, the word’s meaning changed to “disorder” or random and not normal. It is the opposite of order.
Among the offspring of Chaos were:
— Tartarus, the Underworld
— Uranus, the Sky (I could go further with this!)
— Nyx, the Night, and
—Erebos, the Darkness of the Underworld.
IMHO, that’s an amazingly good fit.
OMG. from DTS to EDS. !!
Doge are doing a great job finding all the ways the Democrats have been gaming the funding system..
Of course the Democrats and their hangers on hate it,
Are you one? Maybe you think AOC is the genius !
As I understand it, the provocatively-shaped “space vehicle” didn’t go very far up and it was all over in less than 10 minutes…
Old bald men like Bezos often have that problem.
I did a half-hour search on the internet to find out how much CO2 was emitted into the atmosphere due to this flight. It produced no data. It’s like the information has been suppressed. The spaceship was powered by LNG. There must have been tons and tons emitted.
Surely California EPA has the data as part of the state government push to limit and ban SpaceX launches from Vandenberg.
Hmmm . . . looks like you should have spent an additional hour or so on your Internet searching. Perhaps then you would have found that:
— the vehicle that lofted Katy Perry and her companions was the Blue Origin “New Shepard” reusable rocket,
— it is a single stage launch vehicle that uses only liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen propellants (not LNG),
— the combustion of hydrogen and oxygen does not, and cannot, produce CO2,
— the crew capsule is released from the rocket-powered base and flys on a ballistic trajectory, having no axial propulsion system of its own (excluding the landing-cushioning retro system), barely and momentarily entering “space”, and therefore does not really deserve the designation of being a “spaceship”.
It looks like you confused Blue Origin’s New Glenn launch vehicle with its New Shepard “space tourism” rocket.
Fact check by me: All True!
One could add all the other activities associated with the affair, such as how everyone involved got to the places they needed to be. Were all ground-based movements accomplished with electric vehicles charged with green electrons? 🤔
One should not neglect the CO2 generated in producing the Hydrogen!
Why . . . what’s wrong with CO2?
My understanding is that CO2 is necessary for almost all plant life, and that plant life is the basis for almost all life on planet Earth, including humans.
But perhaps you, like me, are looking to praise the benefits of having more CO2 on Earth.
I was all for this project when I heard they were going to send a bunch of female celebrities into space.
Then I heard they were going to bring them back.
So a bunch of women riding a rocket that looks like a Hitachi Magic Wand is not silly?
There is a long history of celebrities and politicians using huge amounts of energy and money, in order to tell the plebes to live on less.
In other news Bernie Sanders (who himself is a millionaire) and AOC using a private jet to travel the country, to complain about the evils of rich people who try to influence government.
Of course, this only applies to rich people who support Republicans. Rich people who back Democrats are, by definition, completely innocent.
But the ‘Allahgahks’, Mark! We gotta stop these eeeevil bill-yunayus!
(Except Soros, Bezos…)
Gates, Zuck….
It’s amazing how quickly the activists eat their own if given the slightest reason. Think of all those poor virtue signalers with Teslas that went from heroes to outcasts in a New York minute 🙂
A New York Minute = 47 seconds (around here:)
Hollywood is already working on a movie based on this flight. Current working title,”Space Boobs.”. Rick Moranis will reprise his role as Dark Helmet or Jeff Bezos, same thing.
All joking aside, I don’t blame these gals for wanting to go to space. But the media who acted as if this was the most historic flight since Apollo 11, they’re the ones who need to be mocked.
Please give the top five reasons that you imagine “these gals”, collectively (if that’s even possible), wanted to go into space.
Number 1: The thrill of it.
I wouldn’t know about that personally . . . you?
Number 2: They got their pictures and names on the national news.
Number 3: Katy Perry gets free advertisement for her new album.
Katy Perry gets free advertisement
And gives Wendy’s a lot of free PR in the process.
What’s really extreme: there is really something called “Environmental Psychology”!!
Katy Perry (Katheryn Elizabeth Hudson) gets a long and enlightening entry of a Wikipedia page. She has been a complicated young person and remains so. However, she has used her celebrity and money for various (some good) causes. To a pre-teen female, perhaps the little rocket stunt will have meaning.
I had to searchup all of these folks and think Amanda Nguyen is the most interesting.
Not only does this undermine people’s motivation to make changes, it reduces the credibility of leaders. That in turn makes coordinated climate action less likely, because shifting to a low-carbon society will require public trust in leadership and a sense of collective effort.
For some time now I’ve been wondering if these politicians, billionaires and celebrities who preach the anti-carbon agenda but continue to live conspicuous 1%-er lifestyles are really running a massive gaslight operation to purposely sabotage the climate change agenda they otherwise zealously promote. Of course, any genuinely serious effort at eliminating CO2 from the economy would be decimating to their wealth, political power and lifestyles which they obviously would not want to sacrifice. So they transparently participate in this hypocritical behavior that makes it difficult to impossible for any thinking individual to take them and their rhetoric the least bit seriously.
Why? It’s win-win for them. They know that the controversy that they themselves generate with this transparently hypocritical behavior sabotages the agenda so that they won’t ever have to sacrifice their wealth, influence or lifestyles. But they will get to keep their virtue signaling points with their hip peers and the useful idiots who do continue to take them seriously. It’s even better for those who get to profit from the agenda through political power, subsidies or enforced monopolies.
As long as “climate change” remains a religion to a gullible critical mass, the scam will continue and they will continue to be rich, hip & popular without meaningful consequence.
I know women always want to look their best, even in orbit, so this all-female group of space travelers should lobby NASA to reuse the International Space Station as an artificial gravity proof of concept vehicle.
As we know, when women with long hair are in orbit, their hair floats above their heads and looks like an explosion in a silo, Women don’t want to have this look, I’m guessing.
To fix this problem, NASA, who is planning to decommission the International Space Station in the next few years, and allow the space station and all its modules to crash back into the Earth’s atmosphere, where most of it will burn up, should go to Plan B, and not destroy all this valuable orbiting real estate.
Instead of doing that, NASA should use the space station modules to build a rotating space station in orbit which can create the equivalent of the Earth’s gravity on the space station modules.
The way to do this is to initially take three space station modules and a strong cable one mile long with which to attach these three modules together. One module is at the center, and the other two modules are at each end of of the cable. The two outside modules are orbited around the central module at a speed of one revolution per minute (the same speed as the second hand on a clock), and this will cause Earth-equivalent artificial gravity (centrifugal force) to be produced in the modules on each end. The central module will still have a micro-gravity environment.
The reason I use a mile long cable (instead of metrics) is because it makes a nice, easy formula: 1 + 1 = 1. 🙂 One revolution per minute + one mile in diameter = One Earth equivalent gravity on the outside perimeter.
This way the next group of female celebrities that go to the “new” space station will look good the whole time they are onboard! Their hair will be perfect!
Mr. Musk should use this revolving configuration when making trips to Mars to give the astronauts Earth-equivalent gravity all the way to Mars, in orbit around Mars, and on the return trip from Mars.
And Mr. Musk should also be interested in this: We could place additional space station modules on the initial configuration, at various points between the center and the end of the cable, and could simulate the gravity of Mars and the Moon by doing so. If you want to know how Mars and Moon gravity affects humans, here’s your chance to find out.
Artificial gravity is going to be essential if humans are going to spend long periods of time in space. We have a perfect laboratory for studying this already in orbit and scheduled to be thrown away by very shortsighted people (pretty common at NASA Headquarters).
Instead of throwing this away, let’s put it to good use and save ourselves a lot of money, and make the ladies look as perfect as possible, while in space.
“ their hair floats above their heads and looks like an explosion in a silo,”
They need to talk to Newsome about hair restraint gels.
The modules were not designed for those kind of stresses and would quickly be torn apart.
First and foremost, you calculation is off.
The acceleration, a, at a radius R distant from the center-of-rotation at a constant angular rate of w radians per second is calculated by the formula a=(w^2)*R.
For your scenario of R = 0.5 mile = 2,640 ft and w = 1 rpm = 2*pi radians/60 seconds = 0.105 radian/sec, the acceleration would be:
a = (0.105^2)*2640 = 29 ft/(sec^2) = 0.90 Earth’s surface gravitational acceleration (32.2 ft/(sec^2))
. . . close, but no cigar.
Second, mechanical engineers that have looked into this concept, in detail, question if such a rotating “bolo” would be dynamically stable over a period of more than a couple of months due to the non-aligned, time-varying, potentially-resonant tidal forces the Moon-Earth-Sun system would exert on the tethered three-body system. No telling how much propulsion mass and what rocket thrust levels might be required to keep the system stable over the long term, but a NASA supercomputer could probably figure it out.
Same issues apply if the concept is considered for near-Earth space or for a trip to Mars.
And as mentioned by MarkW, none of the existing ISS modules were designed for such stresses. To that you can also add that none of the ISS solar cell arrays could withstand even the rotation-introduced g-loads at the central module, to say nothing about the 0.9 g acceleration at the end of the tethers.
Finally, maybe most importantly, rotation of modules at the end of a just a “cable” effectively means that humans would only be able to transfer between the three separate modules by using EVAs or rocket-powered vehicles; but moreover considering the modules at the end of the tethers, it will be extremely difficult for any spaceship to dock with either module due to difficulty of matching rotation rates between an inertial frame of reference and the non-inertial frame of reference of the rotating tethered system.
There’s devils in them thar details.
Environmentalism has been dogged by Marie Antoinetteism for decades. A publicity stunt with half a dozen prima donnas flying into space is like the real Marie Antoinette touting her preference for riding in a coach-and-four vs. riffraff trudging barefoot in the mud, or like showing starving peasants how to eat cake.
Anybody else find it strange that the same people who applaud putting biological guys in girls sports are applauding a group of all biologically female passengers going into space?
PS This isn’t the first time an all female “crew” went into space. They didn’t “make history”.
“Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova[a][b] (born 6 March 1937) is a Russian engineer, member of the State Duma, and former Soviet cosmonaut. She was the first woman in space, having flown a solo mission on Vostok 6 on 16 June 1963.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valentina_Tereshkova
Simpleton scientist Steve could do well following this advice:
Healer heal thyself.
The silliness started with the leftist legacy media playing this up to fit their fantasy worldview. The reality? Six famous, wealthy, well-connected women took a ten-minute rocket flight 106 km up and had a fun time. That’s it. I’d like to do it myself. Or better, orbit the earth for a few hours. All the media narrative, and the backlash, are made-up stories unrelated to the simple fact that it was essentially a fantastic, expensive carnival ride. Rocket flights are becoming more accessible and less expensive thanks to the work of private companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin. Soon others besides the ultra wealthy will be able to afford it. Sign me up.
HAH! It is most likely that the average Joe or Jan on the street (right- or left-leaning) readily sees through the hypocrisy of this “historic” flight of six females.
In particular, Katy Perry is estimated to have a net worth is around $350 million. The last thing the average US citizen needs or wants is some high-worth celebrity lecturing them about how “meaningful” their roller-coaster-equivalent thrill ride was.
Here are examples of such attributed to Katy Perry after her 11 minute or so flight:
”I think this experience has shown me how much love is inside of me.”
“It’s about making space for future women and taking up space and belonging.” (WTF?)
In addition, Katy promoted her upcoming tour setlist on video during the period of the female “crew” floating in the capsule in microgravity on its ballistic flight.
According to one PR expert Eric Schiffer:
“Katy preaches climate action while burning swimming pools of jet fuel for PR. She’s become a PR pyromaniac, causing her reputation to go boom.
“She’s become the poster child for why some celebrities should disappear. Katy Perry should vanish from the public eye before she becomes a full-time meme. Katy’s an out-of-touch celebrity elite and magnet for making boneheaded moves in a desperate bid for relevance.”
(source https://www.yahoo.com/news/entertainment/articles/katy-perry-reportedly-risks-career-001522483.html )
Thankfully, the American public, in large, is smart enough to recognize celebrity hypocrisy when they see it.
No comment.
Doesn’t that quality as a comment?
Yes but I had nothing nice to say, better I say nothing.
It’s rather rare that many commenters manage to miss the point. This is not about Katy Perry. It’s about the spectacular stupidity of Westlake claiming some significance about anything she or any other celebrity does. The fact that there’s such a thing as an “environmental psychologist” simply shows how absurd parts of the so-called social sciences have become.
“environmental psycho” is a more appropriate term for this parasite.
He states that “shifting to a low-carbon society will require public trust in leadership”
Yeah well, good luck with that…..
So, when she kissed the ground, did she use cherry chapstick, and did Mother Earth like it?
I don’t know why everyone is picking on Katy.
Probably because of her statements after the ride.
Wendy’s has gotten in on it too.
“Picking on”, or rightly pointing out idiotic statements from?