Lauren Sánchez’s Cosmic Bachelorette Party
The plan for America’s first all-female spaceflight was to look good, have a great time, and do a lot of screaming. And honestly? Mission accomplished.
By Suzy Weiss
04.14.25 — Culture and Ideas
If you don’t know what a bachelorette party is like, let me tell you: It’s like being vacuum sealed in a tin can with a bunch of girls you don’t know that well but with whom you have to pretend to have a life-changing experience, for the sake of the bride, who invited everyone and who has a vision.
In other words, it’s exactly what happened on this morning’s historic American spaceflight.
Just after 9:00 a.m., in West Texas, an all-female space crew lifted off and flew to the Kármán line, which is considered the beginning of outer space, thanks to Jeff Bezos’s private spacefaring company Blue Origin. Ten minutes and 21 seconds after they left the ground, and after a brief hang in zero gravity, the capsule carrying the six women landed back on Earth.
The newly minted astronauts include Bezos’s fiancée Lauren Sánchez, pop star Katy Perry, CBS journalist Gayle King, civil rights activist Amanda Nguyen, former rocket scientist Aisha Bowe, and film producer Kerianne Flynn. (While Perry was invited to take part in the experience gratis, according to Blue Origin at least some of the seats on the flight were paid for.) The tagline of the trip was “Taking Up Space” (their crew name was The Six Taking Up Space), and the whole thing smelled of a hen party down to the custom flight patch and matching outfits. The women all wore figure-hugging, blue bell-bottomed flight suits, custom-made by the brand Monse, and delivering on Perry’s promise that the six-lady crew would put the “ass” in astronaut.
A few days ago, Perry told the AP that she was doing this to “inspire” the next generation—but watching all the coverage (I couldn’t wait for this trip), it seems like this flight was more like the most publicized, and most expensive, bachelorette party ever rather than a generational watershed.
It’s hard to know where to start. Sometime in the days before the flight, the women were recorded standing with their arms around each other, looking up at the docked rocket, telling it “We love you” and “Bring us back safe,” as though they were talking to an Uber driver charged with getting them to and from a club in Vegas. Perry also inexplicably told the rocket, “Thank you for helping us heal.”
Before they got on the actual spaceship, each woman rang a bell, a Blue Origin tradition, and at this point I wouldn’t have been surprised if Sánchez, the bride-to-be, had donned a cheap veil from Amazon for the festivities. Gayle King looked like she was marching to her own death during this part, while Sánchez could barely keep from bursting into tears when it came to her time to ring it. There are always two kinds of women at a bachelorette party: one, usually the bride, having the absolute time of her life, and the older girl, maybe a cousin, or a future sister-in-law, who is in abject hell, questioning why she even said yes in the first place.
King’s best friend Oprah was hysterically crying when the thing took off, and I felt for her. I myself have told friends to “just say yes” and go on the girls’ trip to Mexico City—only to regret it, after seeing how greatly they suffered there, under the boot of a brutal itinerary and high expectations around drinking.
When the group got up to space and started floating—everyone’s perfectly coiffed hair flying everywhere—the group huddled to chant “take up space” and then, like when you pregame too hard before hitting a bar, they all split up to do their own thing. Katy Perry held a daisy (her daughter is named Daisy) up for the camera and teared up. She also revealed the setlist for her upcoming Lifetimes tour on a cardboard butterfly before letting it float away. Elsewhere in the pod, Lauren Sánchez held up a plushie of “Flynn”—the dyslexic fly character from her children’s book The Fly Who Flew to Space—and, like a drunk person, kissed it and said, “Proud of you, Flynn.”
Bowe held up an embroidered patch that said “Bahamas” with the Bahamian flag, while Nguyen gave a shout-out to Vietnam. Apparently, at one point Katy Perry sang “What a Wonderful World,” which isn’t my choice for karaoke, but a solid one nonetheless. Like the maid of honor who takes her job very seriously, Perry never sat still. In another shot she is upside down making the shape of a heart with her hands. Then, like any group of girls who knows their horoscopes, someone screams out, “Look at the moon!”
The spacecraft’s descent had the same audio footprint—cackling, screaming, whooping—as one of those 18-person party bikes that you see bachelorettes drinking on all over Nashville. When they got out of the vehicle, back on Earth, like any exhausted bridal party member landing at LaGuardia at 2:00 a.m. Monday morning, it was as though they’d spent years up there. Perry and King each kissed the arid ground once they’d disembarked the pod, with King exclaiming, “Thank you, Jesus.” Sánchez and Nguyen both sobbed. And I must point out that Bezos, the eager groom, fell on his face as he maneuvered to free his bride.
In a post-game interview Perry said the experience in space was up there with “meditation or the Hoffman Process”—the uber-expensive retreat where celebrities go to meditate and exorcise childhood traumas—because “You’re, like, really finding the love for yourself because you got to trust in yourself.”
She added that she felt connected to the “divine feminine.”
The purpose of the trip wasn’t to bring back any moon rocks or calculate the astronomical unit between stars. The point was just to be—literally to take up space—up near the edge of Earth. Much like the bachelorette, the concept was to look good, have a great time, and do a lot of screaming. And honestly? Mission accomplished.
Now come the Instagrams. If you have a full face of makeup, had your hair done, and schlepped to West Texas for your friends to blast through the sound barrier, you may as well get some likes out of it. And sounding for all the world like someone who narrowly survived Atlantic City and who has a rehearsal dinner to plan, Sánchez told the on-site Blue Origin interviewer, “I had to come back. I mean, we’re getting married.”
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