👩‍🚀🎖 Space tourist Katy Perry, hero of progress

One small step for a popstar will one day lead to giant leaps for the rest of us

Apr 16, 2025

My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers,

Real talk: I’m thankful for the celebrity backlash to this week’s celebrity space flight. It wonderfully illustrates the scarcity-obsessed, zero-sum, Down Wing mindset. There’s so, so much 1970s-style, “Limits to Growth” energy and thinking that’s happening here.

To recap: Journalist Gayle King, popstar Katy Perry, and four other women made a 10-minute space jaunt Monday on Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin rocket. (The NS-31 mission also included Lauren Sánchez (Bezos' fiancée), Aisha Bowe, Kerianne Flynn, and Amanda Nguyen.)

Just a quick hop above the Kármán line, the internationally recognized boundary of space about 62 miles above Earth, and a few minutes of weightlessness. All in all, a seemingly harmless bit of space tourism … which actress Olivia Munn criticized as "gluttonous" due to its high cost. Model Emily Ratajkowski also expressed disgust, calling it "end time s**t" on TikTok and questioning the hypocrisy of using vast resources for a space trip while claiming to care about Earth:

What was the marketing there? 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?

Some thoughts on this cosmic controversy (thoughts that will avoid the obvious: snarkily pointing out how weird it is for high-consumption rich people to criticize the high-consumption habits of other rich people):

🚀 First, let’s not pretend any of the negative reaction is substantively about the supposed frivolity of space tourism, specifically. Fun fact: All sorts of environmental and social welfare programs were launched during the Space Age. Yet for some folks, to journey out there — even by true explorers such as Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins — is forever and always a distraction from problems down here. The New York Times editorial on the Apollo 11 landing ominously warned that "As man gains another world ... he stands in imminent danger of losing his own," while Gil Scott-Heron's 1970 poem "Whitey on the Moon" juxtaposed lunar achievements against economic inequality. The moldy argument remains unchanged: solve problems here before venturing there. But it’s a false choice.

🚀 Second, history repeatedly shows that entrepreneurial market capitalism transforms high-end luxuries into middle-class staples. The inexorable march from exclusivity to ubiquity characterizes modern economic progress. Innovations that begin as playthings of the privileged — automobiles, PCs, smartphones — invariably cascade downmarket through competitive forces and scale economies. SpaceX offers a compelling case study: By dramatically reducing launch costs, the company is pioneering what economists might call the "democratization of orbit." Unlike the dystopian visions of films such as Blade Runner, where technological bounty accrues solely to elites (indeed, I call this the Blade Runner Fallacy in my 2023 book) real-world capitalism exhibits a remarkable tendency to distribute its techno-fruits broadly.

🚀 Third, the consumerization of space really might be possible in coming decades. This isn’t pie in the sky thinking. A 2022 Citigroup analysis projects a $1 billion space tourism market by 2040, stratified into distinct segments: some 4,000 annual Kármán Line excursionists (at $50,000 per ticket), 2,500 orbital travelers ($150,000), and 600 lunar adventurers ($650,000). Just as intriguingly, point-to-point rocket travel could revolutionize ultra-premium transportation, with flights priced at $100,000-$200,000 — comparable to private jet journeys but offering dramatic time compression, shrinking ten-hour intercontinental slogs to hour-long hops. As the bank notes, increasing launch frequency and diminishing costs through further innovation may eventually render space "more accessible for the average person." Faster, please!

🚀 Fourth, it would be great if millions of people could become space tourists like Katy Perry. The "overview effect"— that profound cognitive shift experienced by astronauts when beholding Earth from orbit — merits wider dissemination. A bit of empirical evidence bolsters its significance: a 2018 survey of 39 astronauts revealed measurable changes in environmental attitudes and subsequent activism. Even virtual simulations induce minor cognitive shifts resembling the genuine article. Were millions of us to experience this transformation of perspective, humanity might undergo a collective awakening toward real planetary stewardship and techno-solutionism — a most welcome and needed shift for our fractious species.

So set aside the Down Wing pessimism and mock not Katy Perry and her fellow tourists on their brief trip into orbit — or, rather, the thermosphere. One small step for a popstar will one day be followed by millions of such steps by the rest of us as humanity becomes tourists then settlers across the Solar System.