Few things incite a global pile-on as quickly as a group of wealthy, glamorous women being tone-deaf.

Like, for example, accepting a free flight into space from a billionaire, touting it as historic female empowerment, then, as pop star Katy Perry said, declaring you are putting “the ass back into astronaut”. Ha! (Though when exactly was the ass in astronaut?)

All whilst impeccably, laboriously, expensively groomed, winking at cameras.

Lauren Sánchez, journalist and fiancée of the world’s second richest man, Jeff Bezos, gathered a clutch of successful, otherwise creditable friends for this charade along with Perry: former NASA rocket scientist Aisha Bowe, film producer Kerianne Flynn, journalist (and best friend of Oprah) Gayle King, and civil rights activist and scientist Amanda Nguyen.

On Monday, a particularly phallic-looking rocket from Bezos’s tech company Blue Origin shot the women up past the Kármán line — 100 kilometres above the earth, considered to be the threshold of space — for almost 11 minutes of astonishment, and a brief experience of weightlessness, then a return to land in West Texas.

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Only 11 per cent of astronauts are female, so you might consider it a triumph of sorts were it not just simple marketing for Bezos and the weird claims that it might have any impact on any other women in the world.

The headlines were clear: “What’s more vacuous than an endless vacuum? It’s Lauren Sánchez and Katy Perry’s party in space” (The Guardian), “The Perfect Pop Star for a Dumb Stunt” (The Atlantic), “In Space, No One Can Hear You Girlboss” (Pitchfork), and “Lauren Sánchez’s Cosmic Bachelorette Party” (The Free Press). Tina Brown called them “The Real Housewives of Uranus”.

I have three objections to this nonsensical flight.

Space is finally… glam?

First, it had nothing to do with the empowerment of women, and it’s embarrassing that this claim was even made. The entire flight was the stuff of parody as designers from Oscar de la Renta were hired to make skin tight new space suits to, in Sánchez’s words, “bring a little spice to space”.

We learned a special meeting was held to discuss the underwear Sanchez would wear with her snug suit — Kim Kardashian’s shapewear. We saw the beauty preparations — the blow-dries, the fake lashes, the impeccable make up.

Katy Perry in her skin-tight designer space suit. (Supplied: Instagram/ Katy Perry )

I do not object to fashion, and make up, as something fun and creative. But I do object to the idea that women who go into space also need to look hot, instead of, I don’t know, being capable? Competent? Can the bony-arsed still get a ride?

And yet these women, circling the globe, floating, as the rocket blasted out greenhouse gases, held hands and yelled together “TAKE. UP. SPACE.” Sánchez cooed: “We’re going to have lash extensions flying in the capsule!” Perry claimed: “Space is going to finally be glam.”

At last! As if thousands of spinning suns, stars and moons wasn’t enough. Bowe, previously a rocket scientist, told reporters: “I also wanted to test out my hair and make sure that it was OK. So I skydived in Dubai with similar hair to make sure I would be good — took it for a dry run.”

Sánchez told Elle she wanted to encourage “the next generation of explorers”. But these women were passengers in a commercial flight. It would be like airlifting women in ball gowns to the top of Everest and saying, “See? Women can climb mountains! And look cute to boot!”

The reason there have not been more women in space is not because they aren’t pretty enough.

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Who benefits from this space tourism?

Which brings me to my second objection: that the contrast with what is happening with the employment of women, and scientists, in the United States could not be greater. As Jessica Grose writes in the New York Times, a high profile woman wanting to bring light to the obstacles women are facing has much to choose from: like, say, the loss of access to contraception and other health care due to cuts to USAID, significant layoffs in childcare, ongoing erosion of reproductive rights.

As we watched King step out of the rocket and kiss the ground, we could almost forget that the Trump administration has been sacking NASA scientists, including Katherine Calvin, the chief scientist (go girl, yeah! Oh wait). The president’s directives on diversity, equity and inclusion are also forcing NASA to shut down offices, and science funding has been gutted.

Remembering Bezos has donated large amounts of money to Trump, sat in prime position at the inauguration and has scored multi-billion dollar government contracts for Blue Origin.

My third objection is that space exploration in many ways represents the finest of human imagination and innovation, the sharpest, glowing edges of our daring and science. But who benefits from this space tourism, publicity-driven junkets for the friends of billionaires?

All of this talk of “yeah the girls” distracts fundamentally from the consistent testimony of space explorers and astronauts that space travel fundamentally changes you — for the better.

When I was writing my book Phosphorescence, I read reams of the diaries and writings of astronauts, and was continually struck by the impact of the “overview effect” — the profound change in thinking that can occur when astronauts see Earth from space.

In short, it should be an experience of awe where we look outwards and are humbled and sobered to realise how small we are, how irrelevant national boundaries, how fragile the Earth and how much we need to look after it and each other.

But I wasn’t hearing that so much from this group — even though King said she liked how quiet and kind space was — and this is the true shame. When asked what the experience was like, Sánchez said: “I don’t really have the words for this, like…?” Asked again, she responded: “I can’t put it into words but I looked out the window and we got to see the moon.”

The astronaut who best articulated the incredible potency of seeing our planet as a small spot, is the great Carl Sagan. He described the earth as a pale blue dot, seen in a photo taken at his suggestion from Voyager 1 on 14 February, 1990. I’d like to cite it in full because it’s so beautiful:

…you look at it, you see a dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilisations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam. The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. 

Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity — in all this vastness — there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It’s been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”

I’ve often wished we could all go up, have a brief moment of hurtling around the Earth, not to posture or preen, but to show the opposite — we are small, we are humble, and we need to fiercely care for the Earth.

Juila Baird is an author, broadcaster, journalist and co-host of the ABC podcast, Not Stupid.