Katy Perry is said to “regret” the “public spectacle” she made out of her Jeff Bezos-funded trip to space after receiving widespread media attention.
The US pop star was part of the all-female team who took part in a controversial 11-minute expedition into space on Monday (14 April).
Perry, 40, joined Bezos’s fiancee – American journalist Lauren Sánchez – along with Gayle King, former NASA rocket scientist Aisha Bowe, civil rights activist Amanda Nguyen, and film producer Kerianne Flynn in a Blue Origin rocket launched in the Texas desert.
The first female-only mission in more than six decades, it was billed as a historic event by the people behind it. But it has also been attracting mass controversy, as some critics question whether it is quite the feminist moment it has been made out to be.
Some have accused it of being a marketing stunt for Bezos’s space tourism business that is, in turn, the marketing arm of Blue Origin’s commercial launch programme. Celebrities including Emily Ratajkowski, Olivia Wilde and Amy Schumer are among the stars to have condemned it.
Perry, in particular, has been the subject of scrutiny over what some deemed to be an “over-the-top” display both during and after the expedition.
While in the spacecraft, she was filmed raising a daisy to the sky and also sang “What a Wonderful World” by Louis Armstrong. When she disembarked after returning to earth, she was filmed kissing the ground in a widely ridiculed moment, and told a press conference she felt “super connected to love”.
Citing an “inside source”, DailyMail.com now reports that Perry regrets making a “public spectacle” out of the mission.
“Katy doesn't regret going to space. It was life changing. What she does regret is making a public spectacle out of it,” the source said.
They claimed that Perry regretted kissing the ground along with her “close-up camera moments” inside the capsule.
The backlash, they said, had been unexpected for Perry and “disheartening” for the rest of the crew.
The Independent has contacted Perry’s representative for comment.
The “Firework” singer was brutally mocked by the American fast-food chain Wendy’s this week, as its social media channels asked “can we send her back” in response to a caption about her returning from space.
The Wendy’s account then reposted photos of Perry kissing the ground after landing back on Earth, writing, “I kissed the ground and I liked it,” in reference to her 2008 song “I Kissed a Girl”.
Pop singer Kesha appeared to enjoy the chain’s reaction, as she shared a shot of her grinning and drinking a Wendy’s milkshake.
More serious criticism has come from figures such as model and activist Emily Ratajkowski, who called the Blue Origin mission “end time s***”.
“Like this is beyond parody,” she said in an Instagram video. “That you care about Mother Earth and it’s about Mother Earth, and you’re going up in a spaceship that is built and paid for by a company that’s single-handedly destroying the planet?”
“Look at the state of the world. Think about how many resources went into putting these women into space,” she continued. “For what? For what? What was the marketing there? I’m disgusted, literally.”
Meanwhile, actor and director Olivia Wilde shared a viral meme of Perry kissing the ground and wrote on her Instagram Story: “Billion dollars bought some good memes I guess.”
A number of social media users in the comments section of Perry’s Instagram have also been attacking the notion of “rich people casually going to space while our planet is burning and people are starving”.
“This is now empowering, this is embarrassing,” one person said, while another added: “Shame on you for this useless trip in the space, just for the fun, not thinking about the earth and pollution.”
Responding to the backlash, King said that anyone criticising the mission “doesn’t really understand what’s happening here”.
“We can all speak to the response we're getting from young women from young girls about what this represents,” she said. “This is really a lot of work, what went into getting us up and getting us down.”
Perry, meanwhile, appeared to shrug off the critics as she shared a snap of the packed lunch she had prepared for her daughter, Daisy Dove Bloom, whom she shares with her husband, British actor Orlando Bloom.
“Back to the best reality, packing school lunch,” she wrote, adding daisy and love heart emojis.
Daisy was seen in public for the first time on Monday, where she was pictured dressed in an astronaut costume as she watched her famous mother fly to the edge of outer space.
Perry and Bloom reportedly made the “difficult decision” to introduce their daughter to the world so she could be “proud” of Perry and realise that “she can do anything”.
During the press conference, the singer thanked a reporter who called her an astronaut and declared that the journey had “always been about love and belonging”.
“It’s not about singing my songs,” she said. “It’s about a collective energy in there. It’s about us. It’s about making space for future women and taking up space and belonging,” she said. “And it’s about this wonderful world that we see right out there and appreciating it. This is all for the benefit of Earth.”
She said she plans on writing a song about her trip to space.
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