Weightless Privilege, Heavier Consequences
Sustainability Editor Maryam Mustafayeva, LVI, reflects on Blue Origin’s celebrity spaceflight as a symbol of inequality and environmental indifference.
Maryam Mustafayeva
Sustainability Editor, 2025
On April 14th, 2025, Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket lifted off from a launchpad in West Texas, carrying with it a crew of six, including pop star Katy Perry. I guess she finally achieved her goal of shooting across the sky like a firework. The mission, an 11-minute suborbital joyride, was framed as a celebration of female empowerment. But to many watching from Earth, it felt more like a well-polished insult than an inspiring milestone.
The idea that this kind of launch could serve as a display of humanity’s evolution - as it might have in a different era - is fading. Instead, these displays of wealth, privilege, and technological spectacle serve as sharp reminders of just how far the lives of the global elite are from everyone else’s. For the millions of people struggling to make ends meet, watching celebrities float in zero gravity while promoting their brand feels more like a provocation. Blue Origin attempted to frame the launch as a nod to gender progress. But if this were a genuine moment of empowerment, the rocket would have been filled with career astronauts - women who have spent their lives training for space exploration—not pop stars after a two-day ‘training’ course. The symbolic weight of inclusion means little when it’s wrapped in corporate spectacle and launched purely for public relations.
Then there’s the environmental cost. A 2022 University College London study warned that rocket launches contribute disproportionately to climate change. Black carbon particles emitted during combustion are about 500 times more efficient at trapping heat than other soot, threatening both atmospheric health and the ozone layer.
Blue Origin counters this criticism by emphasizing that its rockets burn liquid hydrogen and oxygen, emitting mostly water vapor. The company boasts that nearly 99% of its rocket components are reusable, including the capsule and booster. But atmospheric scientists are not so easily convinced. Even water vapor (considered a greenhouse gas), when released into the stratosphere, contributes to warming. And high-temperature combustion can still produce harmful nitrogen oxides, regardless of the fuel type, destroying the ozone layer.
In this context, the environmental and resource justification for a four-minute suborbital cruise feels shaky at best. At worst, it looks like an exercise in corporate greenwashing, especially when paired with Perry’s rumoured motive: to stir up publicity following lukewarm reception to her album 143.
More troubling, though, is the connection between Blue Origin and its founder, Jeff Bezos. While Blue Origin paints itself as a sustainable enterprise, Amazon (the empire that funds it) tells a different story. In 2023, the company admitted to releasing over 68 million tonnes of carbon emissions. According to Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, 98% of deliveries in 2024 were made using gasoline and diesel. An Oceana report also found Amazon generated over 94 million kilograms of plastic packaging waste in 2022, much of which ends up in countries like India, where it’s often burned, releasing dangerous toxins.
By supporting Blue Origin, celebrities like Perry are also endorsing the larger Bezos machine - one with a well-documented track record of environmental damage and labour exploitation.
And that’s where this launch lands with an exposing and embarrassing thud. During the pandemic, while millions lost jobs, homes, and lives, Bezos added more than $70 billion to his net worth. His workers, meanwhile, toiled in warehouses for modest wages and little protection. The launch of a celebrity-filled rocket, backed by a billionaire who built his fortune on the backs of underpaid labour thus doesn’t feel like a triumph of rocket science, but rather more like a high-altitude version of “Let them eat cake.”
The climate crisis doesn’t affect all people equally. Those least responsible, like low-income communities, people of colour, and the Global South, are often the first and worst hit. And yet, while the Earth heats and food prices rise, the ultra-wealthy chase vanity projects into space.
It’s getting harder to pretend the view from above justifies what’s being ignored below. We don’t just need more innovation, we need equity. Until freedom is shared, not hoarded, rockets will continue to rise while the view from Earth only darkens.