The space company Blue Origin launched an all-female crew on a suborbital flight

The New Shepard rocket lifted off from the Corn Ranch launch site in Texas. The crew consisted of women — and not just tourists, but celebrities.

It included singer Katy Perry, CBS television host Gayle King, aerospace engineer and entrepreneur Aisha Bowe, bioastronautics engineer Amanda Nguyen, producer and director Keriann Flynn, and journalist Lauren Sánchez, who is also the fiancée of Blue Origin head Jeff Bezos. Sánchez also selected her fellow passengers for the tourist flight. The journalist noted that she deliberately chose only women as her companions, since to date they make up only 15% of the more than 700 people who have been to space. The flight of the star-studded crew lasted about 10–11 minutes.

Other celebrities were present at the rocket launch site as well — television host Oprah Winfrey, producer and entrepreneur Kris Jenner, physician and former NASA astronaut, the first African-American woman to travel to space, Mae Jemison, and many others.

The reusable New Shepard spacecraft is specifically designed for commercial tourist flights to the official boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and space. The rocket is equipped with a single-stage 18-meter booster, a descent capsule that accommodates six people, as well as a crew emergency escape system and parachutes.

The rocket's vertical ascent lasted almost two minutes — more precisely, 110 seconds. Then the descent vehicle, i.e., the capsule with the tourists, separated from the booster. It reached an altitude of up to 105 km, just above the Kármán line, which is considered the boundary with space. At the highest point of the flight, the crew remained for four minutes. After that, the capsule began to descend and landed gently using its parachute system.

One of the first space tourists was Jeff Bezos himself, head of Blue Origin and founder of Amazon. He traveled to the edge of space on the New Shepard rocket in 2021, although the spacecraft had been in development since 2006. It is named after the first American astronaut Alan Shepard, who completed a suborbital flight in 1961.

Currently, the cost of such a tourist flight is $500,000. To date, more than 50 tourists have visited the boundary between our planet's atmosphere and space.

In addition to New Shepard, Bezos' company is developing not only tourist spacecraft but also the heavy-lift launch vehicle New Glenn — one of the main competitors of industry leader SpaceX. The first launch of New Glenn took place in January of this year; the rocket reached orbit on its first attempt. The company envisions that in the future, New Glenn will be able to deliver up to 45 tons of cargo to low Earth orbit or up to 13 tons to geostationary transfer orbit. Moreover, Blue Origin is also participating in NASA's independent Artemis program for lunar exploration. The company has already developed the Blue Moon lunar lander.