Originally Authored at TheFederalist.com
When I was a kid, I got to take a tour of the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. Enterprise, NASA’s first space shuttle orbiter, had arrived at the complex earlier that year. My parents got me a 7-inch cast-iron space shuttle with wheels. It was the coolest thing I had seen in my seven years on earth, and I had watched my older brother and his reform school friends construct some pretty awesome backyard forts.
I knew in that humid Florida moment what I wanted to be: An astronaut. The Star Wars franchise of the late 1970s and early ‘80s sealed the deal for me. I begged my parents to send me to Space Camp in Huntsville, Ala. I got a cherry red, Free Spirit FS100 dirt bike instead.
My astronaut dreams dissipated during my junior high years, disappearing altogether when a teacher informed me that an interest and actual skills in advanced math and sciences would likely be required for a career at NASA. Journalism was my FS100.
Perhaps I shouldn’t have given up on my astronaut dreams so fast. This week we learned that literally any moron can be shot into space. You just need to be famous, or quasi-famous. Maybe a dimwitted pop star or an AARP-carrying co-host of a low-ratings network news morning show. It helps if you know a billionaire or, better yet, if you’re sleeping with a billionaire.
That’s One Stupid Step for Womenkind …
Take the “all-female” space flight on Jeff Bezos’ super phallic-shaped Blue Origin rocket. Please.
Katy Perry, Lauren Sanchez and Oprah’s BFF, Gayle King, were the featured crew on this over-hyped, Space Mountain-esque ride — lasting less than 11 minutes. While the ladies pretended to be astronauts and corporate media outlets pretended their brief trek was news, the actual NASA astronauts who were stranded in space for the better part of the last year had to be shaking their heads and mumbling, “Are you f-ing kidding me?!”
Perry dropped to her knees and kissed the ground upon exiting the capsule. Puke. Ground control to Major Drama Queen. The aging pop singer promised threatened to write a song about her space oddity. My Federalist colleague Eddie Scarry worried Bezos was going to request Perry sing “Imagine” as she floated above.
King compared the chickonauts to the first American in space, Alan Shepard.
“We actually duplicated the route that Alan Shepard did … No one said, ‘He took that ride.’ It’s always referred to as a flight or a journey, so I feel that that’s a little disrespectful to what the mission was and the work that Blue Origin does,” King said of her critics. She was quickly and repeatedly mocked.
“This is the first all-women crew to lift off in nearly six decades, following Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova’s solo spaceflight, Blue Origin said,” CBS News, King’s employer, triumphantly reported.
While in flight, the “crew” performed a space walk, shot down an asteroid barreling toward an off-Broadway performance of “The Vagina Monologues” and conducted a stiletto-heel walk on the moon. Of course they did none of that. It was an 11-minute flight. They couldn’t make a pitcher of Tang in that time.
Mocked by Wendy’s
Back on terra firma, the space ladies took quite a bit of ribbing from fellow earthlings who didn’t think much of them boldly going where many men have gone before. Even girlboss-loving leftist news organizations thought the whole exercise banal.
As Fox Business reported, fast-food giant Wendy’s X account deep fried Perry, asking under a post celebrating the singer’s voyage, ”Can we send her back[?]”
Wendy’s then played on Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl” hit, razzing her for her big show back on earth.
“I kissed the ground and I liked it,” the acerbic, red-headed X account declared.
It seems Katy, Lauren, Gayle and the rest of the “all-female” flight slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of ridicule in one of the more laughable publicity stunts of the Space Age.
Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.