Unless something goes wrong, most spaceflights are little reported in the news. Monday’s launch of a Blue Origin New Shepard rocket, though, was an exception. Its all-female crew attracted a huge amount of attention, thanks in part to the inclusion of the pop star Katy Perry. The six women comprised the eleventh crew to fly on this vehicle, with previous passengers including company founder Jeff Bezos and Star Trek actor William Shatner.

These flights do not go into orbit. Instead, they briefly pop above the atmosphere to give the crew a short period of weightlessness and a fantastic view. The flights therefore might seem, in the grand scheme of space exploration, trivial. Yet they are a sign of revolutionary change. Humanity has worked out how to make rockets reusable, enabling massively better cost-effectiveness than could the single-use rockets of yore. This cost-effectiveness has resulted in an explosion of commercial space activity, of which the Katy Perry flight happens to be the most publicly visible part. As well as celebrity flights, reusable rockets have enabled more serious private missions, like the Fram2 mission that flew a crew into polar orbit last month. This is a feat that has never been accomplished by a state-run human spaceflight programme.