Katy Perry, for a moment, was out of this world.
On April 14, Perry, along with various female celebrities including TV personality Gayle King, American journalist Lauren Sanchez, aerospace engineer Aisha Bowe, entrepreneur and activist Amanda Nguyen, and film producer Kerianne Flynn., boarded a spaceship and ascended into outer space. The flight lasted 11 minutes, according to USA Today.
Blue Origin, more formally known as “Blue Origin Enterprises, L.P.,” is an American space technology company founded by Jeff Bezos, an American businessman best known for being the CEO of Amazon. One of the prime reasons why Blue Origin, based in Kent, Oregon, decided to go through with this expedition was to inspire and empower women in various field of STEM, all the while creating a revolutionary moment in the continuous discovery of a vast, unknown entity.
Alyssa Matricciani, a senior boarder from Greenville, S.C., learned about this event through her Instagram feed, because she follows one of the crew members, Katy Perry. While Alyssa applauds the heartfelt message behind this expedition, she believes that the negatives aspects outweigh the positive ones.
“It’s super cool and very empowering to see, but let’s have [some] female scientists go to space, like people who can do research there [and] have put their [lives work] into space and astrophysics,” she pleaded. “I think [the expedition] was a waste of mechanics and engineers’ time, money, and effort. They should be putting things into helping us better understand the atmosphere and coming up with solutions to global warming and CO2 emissions.”
As of a recent study conducted by NASA, scientific results show that human activities have elevated the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide content by 50% in less than 200 years. A trip to space would fall into this category of “human activities,” because the vessel releases black carbon, nitrogen oxides, and other pollutants. When these toxins are released into the stratosphere, they can disrupt the ozone layer, thus contributing to warming.
Gemma Polino, a senior from Hadley, Mass., has a similar perception to Alyssa.
[The trip] is not inspiring at all because [Katy Perry] is not a woman in STEM. If they were going to send women [into] space, it should have been [women] who work for NASA and put work into space advancement,” Gemma explained. “The whole thing was obviously a publicity thing for Katy Perry, because she is in her ‘flop era’ right now.”
In an article published by Today, the “flop era,” is a slang term that describes, “going through a hard time, not thriving or otherwise failing.”
Ken Choo is a Science teacher at Williston who also teaches the astronomy elective. Mr. Choo, as opposed to Alyssa and Gemma, does not see this expedition as a substantial threat to global warming.
“We have a lot of other bigger problems and contributing factors to global warming than just a single rocket launch into space,” Choo notes. “To pin [the expedition] towards global warming when there’s other issues like the massive burning of fossil fuels, it doesn’t really match from my point of view.”
