Blue Origin crew members of 6 women who landed safely after space travel, including Gail King and Katy Perry
Radio reporter Gayle King and singer Katy Perry briefly entered space on Monday on a plane run by Jeff Bezos’ private company Blue Origin. This is the first time that all female staff has gone to space since 1963.
Their flight on Blue Origin’s new Shepard rocket lasted 10 minutes and 21 seconds and took off from Blue Origin’s Punation One at a launch site in West Texas, about 120 miles southeast of El Paso at 8:30 a.m. local time.
After the flight, Ms. Jin left the crew capsule and said, “I want to spend a while on the ground,” kneeling down.
Ms. Jin was afraid of traveling before it was released.
“I walked out of my comfort zone in a way I never thought of it,” Ms. Kim said. “Now that I have done it, I do feel like I can accept anything.”
Ms. Perry sang “What a wonderful world” in the flight, Ms. King said.
Ms. Perry returned to Earth and said, “It’s not singing my song, it’s about the collective energy there.”
This is the 11th human flight of the new Shepard program, which has previously flew 52 people, including the repeated astronauts on the Kármán line, an internationally recognized space boundary about 62 miles (100 kilometers) above the Earth.
Flights on the new Shepard rocket offer a few minutes of weightlessness without pilots.
Before Monday’s release, “CBS Morning” dedicated a large portion of its broadcast to “Gal’s Go to Space.” Between the show’s typical morning news updates, Texas has videotapes and interviews with people who used to be space, including Blue Original Flights.
Family and friends of passengers of the flight gathered in Texas to watch the launch, including Ms. King’s close friend, Oprah Winfrey. Kris Jenner, the patriarch of the Kardashian family, and her daughter Khloé Kardashian, were also in the crowd.
Mr Lauren Sánchez, a former broadcaster, is also known as the NS-31 mission. The couple’s wedding is reportedly scheduled to be held in Venice this summer.
The other passengers were Aisha Bowe, a former rocket scientist with NASA, who told Eller that she was the first person to go to space on the Bahamas legacy. film producer Kerianne Flynn; and Amanda Nguyen, a biological focus research scientist and a well-known advocate of sexual assault survivors.
According to Blue Origin, Ms. Nguyen was the first Vietnamese women to go to space.
“It’s a dream come true, and for me it’s a dream delay,” Ms nguyen told Elle.
She said she worked for NASA and studied astrophysics but turned her attention to activism after sexual assault.
“Gender-based violence is a big reason why so many women in STEM continue to train, and I am one of them,” she said. She refers to science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
Since Valentina Tereshkova flew alone to the Soviet Union in 1963, it was the first space flight with an all-female crew and became the first woman to arrive in space.
But some critics are confused by the suggestion that the all-female crew represents a moment of feminist progress. The new Shepard program is at the heart of Blue Origin’s space tourism business and is a wealthy, powerful and connected pathway to space.
Actress Olivia Munn called the trip “a bit glutton” when she hosted a guest appearance on this month’s Today with Jenna & Friends.
“I know this isn’t a cool thing to say, but there are a lot of other things that are so important in the world right now,” Ms. Mumen said. “What are you going to do in space?”
In an interview with “CBS Morning” aired on Friday, host Vladimir Duthiers asked Ms. King if she was worried that the flight was an ad for Amazon founder Mr. Bezos. Mr. Duthiers noted that Mr. Bezos was under scrutiny due to Amazon’s business practices and his ownership of the Washington Post.
Amazon warehouse workers and delivery drivers complain about unsafe working conditions. In 2023, the Federal Trade Commission and 17 states sued Amazon for protecting a monopoly on online retail.
In The Washington Post, he resigned in recent months due to concerns about leadership, including Mr. Bezos, decided to reposition the newspaper’s opinion section to promote “personal freedom and free market.”
“Listen, it’s also disturbing,” Ms. Kim said. “He made some questions and decisions and I’ve actually gone, ‘Huh?”
“But in this particular case, Vlad, it’s much bigger than a person and a company,” she continued. “I chose to separate the two.”
Mr. Bezos has spent billions of dollars on the blue source and talked about how he envisions the future of colonies where humans live in space. He is the first orbital passenger flight of Blue Origin in 2021.
The new Shepard rocket is named after Alan Shepard, an American who arrived in space in 1961 and one of the astronauts riding on the moon.
