Crew Makes History In All-Female Spaceflight
On April 14, 2025, pop star Katy Perry and five other women embarked on a historic space mission aboard Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket.
The launch from West Texas at 9:31 a.m ET (1331GMT) marked the first all-female spaceflight in more than 60 years, since Valentina Tereshkova’s solo mission in 1963.
A live broadcast by Blue Origin said that the six-person crew which includes Bezos’ fiancée, Lauren Sanchez, CBS host Gayle King, former NASA rocket scientist Aisha Bowe, scientist Amanda Nguyen and film producer Kerianne Flynn, travelled to the edge of space, where they experienced a brief period of weightlessness before returning to Earth in a flight lasting around 11 minutes.
The space company founded by billionaire Jeff Bezos, was a high-profile success for Bezos’ New Shepard launch vehicle, which has been developed for space tourism.
According to King, the crew returned to their seats after weightlessness, Perry sang the Louis Armstrong song “What a Wonderful World.”
“I feel super connected to love,” Katy Perry said after landing back on Earth while holding a daisy, she took into space, to remind her of her daughter, Daisy.
Among the celebrities in attendance at the launch pad were Oprah Winfrey, Kris Jenner and Khloe Kardashian.
It was the first all-female spaceflight since Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova – the first woman in space – orbited Earth during a nearly three-day solo flight in 1963.
Blue Origin added that the website aims to radically reduce the cost of access to space, with its rockets designed for reusability.
Loizos Heracleous, a professor of strategy and organization at Warwick Business School in Britain, estimates each launch of the New Shepard costs between $1 to $3 million.
“Even ignoring development cost, there are six seats so each passenger would have to pay around half a million USD for this to be a financially viable ongoing business,” Heracleous said. “It will take a long long time before space tourism can be a financially sustainable business available to the public at large.” he added.
REUTERS
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