Katy Perry went to space but does that make her an astronaut?
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Baby, she's a firework.

And now Katy Perry has been launched into space on a rocket and is reportedly an astronaut. That's after she and five other well-known women blasted off from Texas on Monday on a space flight run by Blue Origin, the aerospace company owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos. Among the other passengers were Gayle King, an American TV personality known to many as Oprah Winfrey's best friend, and Lauren Sanchez, Jeff Bezos' fiancée.

On the ground, celebrities like Orlando Bloom and Kris Jenner cheered them on, while inside the capsule, the crew delivered a message of female empowerment. "Take up space," they said. Well, not everyone is sure that message is resonating with the masses, who lack the wealth and celebrity that seemed compulsory to join the mission.

Summing up some of the criticism, an American commentator called it "one giant stunt for womankind" and a British columnist described it as "more vacuous than an endless vacuum." So on today's episode, we're gonna tell you what the latest Blue Origin spaceflight was all about and what it may mean for the future of space tourism.

I'm William Lee Adams, and this is What in the World from the BBC World Service. Oh, the moon! You guys, I have to tell you, look at the moon! What? Look!

Here to tell us more is the BBC's science correspondent, Victoria Gill. Vic, hi. Hi, how are you doing? Really well. Thank you for joining us. My pleasure. So first things first, could you tell us a little bit about the mission itself? It sounds pretty short. It was certainly that. Mission. Mission is a little bit of a stretch. So this is actually the 11th

space flight with people on it for Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket, they call it. So this rocket is designed to basically fly itself. And it is what they call a suborbital flight. So it just about takes you to space. This line kind of that the boundary that separates officially the end of Earth's atmosphere and outer space, we call it the Kármán line, and it's about 100 kilometres up.

And then they come back down. And this flight that had these six women aboard, it was the idea of Lauren Sanchez, who is the fiance of Jeff Bezos, the billionaire founder of Blue Origin and owner of Blue Origin. It was her idea. And she invited along a bunch of her friends, one of whom is Katy Perry. That was the person getting a lot of the headlines. But the other people aboard were Gayle King, a very well-renowned TV journalist. There was Amanda Nguyen, who is a scientist turned human rights activist.

There was Aisha Bowe, who is a rocket scientist, formerly worked for NASA and is now an entrepreneur and activist as well. And there was a film producer called Carrie-Anne Flynn. And they all got aboard the capsule that sits on top of this rocket. They all strapped into their seats.

It went straight up. I think it gets to about 80 kilometers. Then the rocket booster part of the rocket separates from the capsule. The capsule keeps on going. While they're there, they can unstrap from their seats. And we had some footage from inside where Katy Perry was waving a daisy at the camera in honor of her daughter, who's called Daisy. For about three minutes, they all floated around weightless in space and then they strapped back into their seats.

And the capsule came back down in this controlled freefall, released three parachutes and landed very slowly and safely on the ground. And everybody was fine and very happy. And they all kissed the ground. And Jeff Bezos was there to meet his fiancee and give her a big hug. And it lasted exactly 10 minutes and 21 seconds. So a very brief visit to space. Now, I don't want to take away from their joy or the holding up of daisies. But is there anything one can do that's useful in those 11 minutes? Hmm.

I mean, I think no is the answer. The technical achievement of the design of this rocket, being able to achieve this flight in a totally autonomous way is impressive. And it's something that the company has refined so that you can now go on the Blue Origin website and basically click a button that says take me to space.

By the way, the company will ask you for a fully refundable deposit of $150,000 in order to start that order process, as they put it, for getting yourself a flight to space. But this is space tourism. We'd spoke to quite a few scientists, space scientists and people who are involved in the space industry who make that very clear distinction that this is space tourism, not space exploration.

One of the things that the Blue Origin team were saying when they landed and they were greeting the crew, as they called them, as they emerged from the capsule, was, now you're an astronaut.

I don't know. Astronauts train their entire lives to gain a level of expertise, to be able to carry out research in space, to be able to maintain and understand the craft that they operate. And, you know, there are astronauts that train their entire lives and never go to space, but they're still astronauts. Popping to space for a few minutes, I'm not sure that makes you an astronaut. And there's certainly a lot of space scientists would be fairly adamant that it doesn't.

There was some scientific equipment, if we can call it that, aboard. I think Lauren Sanchez had a box under her seat that was measuring things like the acceleration and the g-force and taking in certain measurements during the experience of weightlessness. And that data was going to be shared with school science classes.

It was more of a demonstration. We don't really have anything that we don't know about that whole journey that we needed to learn from this particular mission. And there's girl power, and then there's girl power powered by rocket fuel, you could say. And while there may not be a huge scientific reason for the trip, do you think this is useful in sort of promoting the idea of space and space exploration among young people? It's an interesting question.

I feel quite conflicted about this. It's an interesting one. There was an issue with how this looked to people, with how this was presented as something that was highly empowering and inspiring to the next generation of women. This was cast

by Blue Origin as something that was going to be inspirational to the next generation of young girls who would maybe want to travel to space or want to work in space science. You know, Aisha Bowe is a big advocate of STEM, science, technology, engineering and maths education for young women.

But this ultimately was a billionaire's company inviting along a group of people at huge cost to take a very short trip to space as passengers.

There was a bit of a clang, of a clash of how it was intended to be presented and how people sort of took this. I think there was quite a lot of backlash. Actually, on that note, I want to read this quote from the American actor Olivia Munn, who was appearing on an American morning show. She said, quote, What are you guys going to do up in space? I know this is probably obnoxious, but like it's so much money to go to space. And there's a lot of people who can't even afford space.

Are there any other reasons people were unhappy with the mission, specifically related to the environment, for instance? Yeah, that's a really good point. You know, the fact is that every time we send a rocket up,

it pollutes the atmosphere and it pollutes many many layers of the atmosphere. There's checks and balances every single time you send a rocket up. One of the things that Blue Origin said was that their rocket has zero carbon emissions and that its only emission is water and water vapor. Now the zero carbon thing is right. There's no carbon in this particular rocket fuel. It's hydrogen based.

So what they claimed was that as you combine that, I'm going to get into a bit of a science lesson now, I hope you forgive me. But as you burn that hydrogen, so as you kind of combine hydrogen and oxygen together, you get H2O, which is water. So the only emission from this rocket is water vapor. That is not possible. As you send a rocket burning this fuel at an incredibly high temperature, way up, 100 kilometers up into the atmosphere...

it reacts with other gases in the atmosphere and it turns them into other pollutants. There's a gas called nitrogen in our atmosphere and that gets converted into nitrogen oxide gases. It gets combined in this very, very hot environment. So you're putting things in these different layers of the atmosphere that shouldn't be there. You put them there because you're sending a very hot rocket way up.

Some of those are greenhouse gases. Water vapour is basically kind of water gas. That's a greenhouse gas. That's, you know, something we don't talk about. It's a planet warming gas. We're putting it very, very high up into the atmosphere where it's not supposed to be and where it doesn't get washed away by rain because you don't get rain 100 kilometres up. It sticks around. It could stick around for years. And you're also changing things about the atmosphere further up that can do damage to our ozone layer, which is the protection...

protective natural shield around our earth that guards us from the sun's most harmful rays. So,

We have to be honest that every time we send up a rocket, we are having impacts on our environment. Proponents of space tourism and these, you know, space exploration companies that are commercializing space say that it's an important part of making our species a multi-planetary species. You know, I think a lot of us will have heard Elon Musk, who owns SpaceX, talk about how he wants to take humanity to Mars, right?

That, you know, we need to be able to be exploring other planets and that the technology that those companies are developing and they're paying for partly by space tourism is allowing for that. And we've been speaking in the plural here, space exploration companies. We talked about space tourism trips that have already taken. Is there a sense that tourism, space tourism, is now safe and that...

There's no risk. There's always risk, right? You saw a lot of very famous nervous faces when this rocket was going up. When you sit in a capsule on top of a rocket, you're sitting on top of what's essentially a controlled explosion. So every launch has its risks. And, you know, we'll have seen people who follow space launches closely will have seen some test launches in spectacular failures just exploding on the launch pad. And, you know, our space exploration history is littered with tragedy here.

Some space exploration experts that I've spoken to about this story have said that's why space tourism launches like this. You demonstrate it can be done in a safe way, that, you know, that it can be automated. I mean, my goodness, this rocket flies itself up to space, comes back down. Its rocket booster lands upright, right?

exactly where the company wanted to, and then the capsule floats down and brings the people back safely. And it's done that 11 times. So this says to the regulators of this industry, of this growing tourist industry, that yes, this is being done responsibly, it's being done safely, and it can be carried out, you know, repeatedly, reliably in this safe way. And that's what is significant about a launch like this.

Final question for you. Lauren Sanchez, the fiance of Jeff Bezos, she said after landing that she was very emotional and that the trip had changed her and that she really wished more people could experience it.

Do you think that's going to be possible in the near future? Depends what you mean by near future. I don't think in my lifetime we're going to see this be a regular and common and affordable experience. So I still think that for years to come, as this technology develops,

it's still going to be the preserve of the very rich or, you know, perhaps, hopefully, the preserve of scientists and explorers as well. I think there maybe needs to be a bit more of a discussion of exactly kind of what

space is for and the pros and the cons and the costs and the benefits of going there before we say, yeah, let's have one of these launches every single day. Victoria Gill, BBC science correspondent. Thank you so much for explaining that. Thank you.

That's all for today. If you had your watch on, you may have noticed that this episode was longer than the amount of time our girl spent in space. But if you want to extend your mission in space, we've got tons of episodes in our back catalog, including one about India's space mission and another called Who Owns the Moon? Just search for those wherever you're listening to us right now. I'm William Lee Adams. This is What in the World from the BBC World Service, and we'll see you again soon.