I doubt that when pop star Katy Perry and her all-female crewmates took their seats atop a 63-foot-tall, 75-tonne metal tower and were launched 62 miles above the Earth, they knew how controversial their flight would be.

I don’t doubt that their experience was profound.

I can’t imagine how it feels to see the Earth from orbit, on it, as Carl Sagan put it, "everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was... on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam."

I see little need to belittle that experience or the women on that flight.

Human beings have looked to and been inspired by the stars for millennia, and several successive generations have now grown up with space exploration as a reality, albeit a distant one for most of us.

If someone offered you the opportunity to go into space and see the Earth from orbit, even if it’s just for 11 minutes, would you turn them down?

I wouldn’t.

Was the all-female NS-31 flight a blatant promotional exercise for Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, which has auctioned off seats for as much as $28m?

Yes.

Was Ms Perry using the attention paid to the flight to promote her upcoming tour crass?

Of course.

Was it disgraceful to dress all of this up as one small step for feminism while primarily benefitting a billionaire man who intervened to prevent the Washington Post from endorsing Kamala Harris and whose primary enterprise, Amazon, donated $1m to a president whose Supreme Court appointments secured the rollback of abortion rights in the US?

Undoubtedly.

Jeff Bezos (Image: Newsquest)

But ultimately, this is all very representative of modern America – indeed, the wider modern West – and the realities of the privatised billionaires-only space race.

The NS-31 flight may have acted as........

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