Blue Origin Sends Six-Female Crew Into Space: Includes Lauren Sanchez, Katy Perry
The New Shepard rocket of Blue Origin, owned by the founder of the retail giant Amazon Jeff Bezos, launched from a spaceport in Texas. An all-female crew took off, reports Air force.
Photo: Blue © Siarhei Yurchanka | Dreamstime.com
Bezos sent his fiancée Lauren Sanchez and five other women into space: CBS anchor Gayle King, former NASA rocket scientist Aisha Boe, civil rights activist Amanda Nguyen, film producer Kerrianne Flynn and pop singer Katy Perry.
The New Shepard rocket lifted off at about 8:30 a.m. (13:30 GMT) and reached the so-called Karman Line, the edge of space located about 100 kilometers above the Earth's surface.
The fully automated ship rose vertically to this altitude, then the capsule with the crew separated and descended to the ground with the help of parachutes and a rocket decelerator.
The flight lasted about 11 minutes. For a short time, the crew was in a state of weightlessness.
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The NS-31 mission was the 11th human spaceflight for Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket and the 31st overall. To date, the program has sent 52 people into space. The company has not disclosed how much one seat on New Shepard costs.
Before the launch, the women posed for photos for Elle magazine, which reported, not without irony, that this was the first time people had gone into space wearing makeup.
"Space is finally going to be glamorous," Sanchez noted.
Katy Perry and Gayle King dropped to their knees and kissed the ground upon exiting the capsule.
"I'm so proud of this team," Lauren Sanchez said with tears in her eyes after landing. "I can't put it into words."
The earth, she said, "looked so quiet" that she didn't expect it: "It was quiet, but very alive."
Gayle King admitted that the highlight of the flight for her was hearing Katy Perry sing Louis Armstrong's What a Wonderful World.
Kerrianne Flynn told how her son told his friends about her flight, and they didn’t believe him: “Moms don’t fly into space.”
"This mom went into space," she smiled.
Aisha Bou said she "felt the energy in the capsule," and when they reached space, there was a moment when the women just looked at each other.
At a press conference after the flight, Katy Perry was asked why she took a daisy into space.
The singer replied that she took the chamomile because her daughter's name is Daisy, which means "chamomile."
The flower is often considered a weed, Perry added, but to her it is the smile of God.
Aisha Boe, a rocket scientist, was introduced at a press conference as the first woman from the Bahamas to travel into space.
Bowe recalled that Alan Shepard's ship Freedom 7 splashed down near the Bahamas. Now, on the New Shepard, she was able to almost repeat its trajectory.
In May 1961, Alan Shepard became the second person on Earth to travel into space, but his ship did not orbit the Earth like Yuri Gagarin's Vostok 1, but "jumped" far beyond the Karman Line and returned.
The first and last all-female space flight took place more than 60 years ago, when Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman to fly solo into space on the Vostok 6 spacecraft.
It is possible that the new women's space flight has another purpose - to maintain public interest in Blue Origin, because the competition in the field of space tourism is gaining momentum.
Bezos' main competitor is Virgin Galactic, which offers similar suborbital flights.
In January, Blue Origin's more powerful rocket, called New Glenn, successfully completed its first uncrewed orbital flight.
In the future, Blue Origin, in direct competition with Elon Musk's SpaceX, plans to deliver space tourists into orbit.
According to experts, the main battle for commercial space launches will unfold between Musk and Bezos. So far, Space X is noticeably ahead of its competitor: Falcon 9 rockets have already been launched 469 times. In contrast, Blue Origin has only successfully launched its New Shepard spacecraft 31 times.
Earlier this year, Blue Origin launched its larger, reusable rocket, New Glenn (named after John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth), from Cape Canaveral, Florida. The company says it operates like a “cleaner-fueled commercial airliner” and will be able to deliver 13 tons of payload to geostationary orbit and 45 tons to low Earth orbit.
However, Blue Origin remains in second place in this space battle. SpaceX currently produces and launches two rockets: Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy. These rockets feature booster stages that return to Earth for repair, which saves money and helps SpaceX outpace its competitors.
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SpaceX also operates the Dragon space capsule, which can deliver crew and cargo to the International Space Station, and is working on a larger rocket system, Starship, that can deliver significant payloads into space.
SpaceX and Blue Origin have already clashed in court over billions of dollars in government funding, and their owners have traded barbs on the social media site X (also owned by Musk).
Musk's rivals believe he is seeking to create a monopoly in the private space industry. Blue Origin is already sounding the alarm about SpaceX's potentially unfair competitive advantage in the space race.
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