While watching some of the crew reflect on the “phenomenal dream” experience and gushing about how Bezos is “building the road to space,” I was reminded of what William Shatner wrote about his own trip to space in his book Boldly Go: Reflections on a Life of Awe and Wonder. After playing a Starfleet captain on TV for decades, Shatner finally journeyed into the final frontier on a Blue Origin rocket in 2021, becoming, at age 90, the oldest person to travel to space at the time. He’d expected to feel “the ultimate catharsis of that connection I had been looking for between all living things.” When he got up there and looked down at the Earth, though, he found the opposite.
“I discovered that the beauty isn’t out there, it’s down here, with all of us. Leaving that behind made my connection to our tiny planet even more profound,” he writes. “It was among the strongest feelings of grief I have ever encountered. The contrast between the vicious coldness of space and the warm nurturing of Earth below filled me with overwhelming sadness. Every day, we are confronted with the knowledge of further destruction of Earth at our hands: the extinction of animal species, of flora and fauna . . . things that took five billion years to evolve, and suddenly we will never see them again because of the interference of mankind. It filled me with dread. My trip to space was supposed to be a celebration; instead, it felt like a funeral.”
No such insight from the girlboss rocket launch, unfortunately. I’m not saying this is a direct result of the hubris of the mission, butterfly effect style, but a week later Pope Francis, the most progressive leader the Catholic Church has ever had, died hours after meeting JD Vance. A power outage took out a massive chunk of continental Europe, plunging international company WhatsApp groups into disarray. And CNN announced that Gwyneth Paltrow has started eating carbs and cheese again. All clear apocalypse indicators.
Meanwhile, Katy Perry is struggling to fill half the seats on her current tour – the one she made history promoting in (the edge of) space, yes – after releasing an album of bizarre Hillary Clinton-era feminist songs in 2024 that was the worst-reviewed of her career and among the most panned albums of the decade. It’s a genuinely shocking turn from someone who defined the pop landscape for so much of the late 2000s and early 2010s – her bottomless brunch bangers and cartoonish eccentricity now swapped for empty political messaging and the wide, dead eyes of someone who went to Burning Man and never spiritually returned. All things considered, maybe orbit wasn’t the worst place for her after all. At least in space, no one can hear you flop.
Emma Garland is a freelance writer and former digital editor of Huck. Follow her on Bluesky.
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