Today, April 14, a commercial flight took place as part of Blue Origin’s 31st New Shepard suborbital mission. The spacecraft crew was made up entirely of women: singer Katy Perry, film producer Cariann Flynn, CBS Mornings journalist and anchor Gayle King, STEMBoard CEO and former NASA rocket scientist Aisha Bowe, bioastronautics researcher Amanda Nguyen, and mission commander Lauren Sánchez — fiancée of Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos.
The New Shepard rocket launched at 1:30 p.m. GMT (4:30 p.m. Moscow time) from the company’s launch site in West Texas, USA. The flight lasted about 10.5 minutes. Two and a half minutes after liftoff, the passenger capsule separated from the booster rocket and soared above the Kármán line — the boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and outer space. The women spent around four minutes in zero gravity before the spacecraft returned to a landing pad near the launch site in Texas.
After the successful return, Katy Perry knelt and kissed the Texas soil.
This was the first all-female space mission since Valentina Tereshkova’s historic solo flight in 1963. The New Shepard spacecraft operated fully autonomously, so the crew did not need to pilot it themselves.
Katy said she had dreamed of going to space for a long time.
“Space is finally going to be glamorous,” Perry said ahead of the launch. She explained that she made the decision for her daughter Daisy:
“To show her that anyone can live out their dreams — regardless of background, ethnicity, economic status, or education. She’s already such a big dreamer, and she’s only four. But I’m also doing this for the entire next generation.”
