Did a photograph show a fake hand on board the crew capsule after an April 14, 2025, Blue Origin space flight, suggesting the whole endeavor was a hoax? No, that's not true: The photograph did show the hand of a mannequin, but it was taken after a December 2017 test flight, not the crewed mission in 2025. The picture, placed in its proper context, involved no deception whatsoever.
The claim appeared in an April 16 post on X (archived here), which read:
Something is definitely wrong with the Blue Origin "Space Flight"... that Katy Perry was on
Social media users are asking, where are the re-entry burn marks? And why does that look like a fake hand?
lol this world is so crazy
This is what it looked like at the time of writing:
(Source: X screenshot)
The photo was real, and not the result of digital manipulation, and did indeed show a fake hand. However, it had nothing to do with the April 2025 space flight, which involved a crew of Katy Perry, Gayle King, Aisha Bowe, Kerianne Flynn, Lauren Sánchez and Amanda Nguyen.
Rather, it was taken in December 2017, and showed the crew capsule from a Blue Origin test flight, with the mannequin on board partly visible. Here is the original photograph, along with the caption provided on the Blue Origin website:
(Source: Blue Origin. "A recovery team prepares to retrieve payloads from New Shepard's crew capsule for the first time. December 12, 2017")
The 2017 test flight, complete with mannequin, can be watched in full below:
