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- Blue Origin announced its all-women space crew, including Gayle King and Katy Perry.
- This mission marks the first all-female crew since 1963, led by Jeff Bezos’ fiancée Lauren Sánchez.
- The 11-minute journey will use Blue Origin’s reusable, autonomous New Shepard rocket.
Jeff Bezos’ fiancée is headed to space.
Helicopter pilot and former journalist Lauren Sánchez will lead an all-women crew, including “CBS Mornings” cohost Gayle King and pop star Katy Perry lifting off to space this spring on a Blue Origin spaceship.
The six-person crew will also include research scientist and Nobel Peace Prize nominee Amanda Nguyen, former NASA scientist Aisha Bowe, and film producer Kerianne Flynn. Sánchez “brought the mission together,” Blue Origin announced on Thursday.
“She is honored to lead a team of explorers on a mission that will challenge their perspectives of Earth, empower them to share their own stories, and create lasting impact that will inspire generations to come,” it added.
The 11-minute journey will take a six-person crew past the Kármán line, which is the “internationally recognized boundary of space.” Blue Origin says it will be the first all-female flight crew since Valentina Tereshkova’s flight to space in 1963. It marks the 11th human flight with Blue Origin’s New Shepard program, which uses Blue Origin’s reusable, suborbital rocket system built for human flight. The rocket is fully autonomous with no pilots.
Sánchez is following in Bezos’ footsteps with the launch.
The first passengers of the New Shepard program included Bezos and his younger brother Mark Bezos, who owns a private equity firm and volunteers as a firefighter. The crew had about three minutes to float around before gravity pulled them back toward the ground.
“I’ll tell you something very interesting: zero gravity feels very natural. I don’t know if it’s because it’s like a return to the womb,” Bezos later said in a podcast interview.
Bezos also said that the crew on his flight experienced the overview effect — or overwhelming feelings that astronauts can experience when viewing the Earth from space.
“You see how fragile the Earth is. If you’re not an environmentalist, it will make you one,” he added.
However, in a later flight, “Star Trek” actor William Shatner also flew up to space with Blue Origin’s New Shepard program and had a less pleasant experience. Shatner wrote in his book that it was a dark experience for him that “felt like a funeral,” and he experienced “the strongest feelings of grief” during the trip.
“I love the mystery of the universe,” he wrote. “All of that has thrilled me for years…but when I looked in the opposite direction, into space, there was no mystery, no majestic awe to behold…all I saw was death.”
“I had a different experience because I discovered that the beauty isn’t out there, it’s down here, with all of us,” the actor wrote. “Leaving that behind made my connection to our tiny planet even more profound.”
Blue Origin is an aerospace manufacturer and spaceflight company headquartered in Washington. It’s owned by Bezos and currently headed by former Amazon exec Dave Limp. Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000 and has said it’s his “most important work.
