Jeff Bezos‘ fiancée Lauren Sánchez made history on Monday, becoming part of the first all-female crew to launch toward space in the 21st century. The last time was in 1963 when cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space.
Katy Perry, Gayle King, Aisha Bowe, Amanda Nguyen, and Kerianne Flynn joined Sánchez on the flight.
“It was a feeling of joy and camaraderie. It was a feeling of gratefulness. It was a feeling that we’re doing this,” Sánchez said shortly after returning to Earth.
The journalist and helicopter pilot rode Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket, which takes space tourists to 62 miles above Earth’s surface — to the Kármán line, which is the internationally recognized boundary between space and our planet.
The rocket is named after the NASA astronaut Alan Shepard, who conducted a similar, brief suborbital flight to become the first American in space in 1961.
“Alan Shepard did this same exact flight and he became the first American in space, and six women just did the same flight,” Sánchez said.
‘More connected than you realize’
The six women experienced weightlessness for about three minutes before falling back to Earth. Looking out of the rocket’s windows in those few moments of zero-G, Sánchez said she felt connected.
“Earth looked so, it was so quiet,” she said adding that, “You look at it and you’re like — we’re all in this together. That’s all I could think about, like, we’re so connected, more connected than you realize.”
Astronauts have long described similar, overwhelming feelings of awe, unity, and appreciation for Earth’s fragility as they gaze down on our planet from space. They call it “the overview effect.”
Shepard himself said he cried when he saw Earth from the moon during an Apollo mission in 1971. The Star Trek actor William Shatner also cried when he returned from a suborbital Blue Origin flight in 2021, saying: “It has to do with the enormity and the quickness and the suddenness of life and death.”
Sánchez said she was proud of her fellow crew members’ bravery while venturing into the unknown.
“Gayle — you know we were just talking in the capsule — doesn’t even have ear piercings, she’s so afraid to do anything. And she got in that capsule, and I think it profoundly changed her,” Sánchez said.
Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000 and has been launching tourists to space since the billionaire himself flew on New Shepard’s maiden passenger flight in 2021.
Bezos founded Blue Origin with the idea to help move heavy, polluting industries off our planet and into space, and has said the company could lay the groundwork for one trillion people to live and work in space someday.
This goal is still a long way off but Blue Origin is making progress.
Although New Shepard can only skim the edge of space, in January the company flew its orbital mega-rocket New Glenn for the first time. New Glenn is designed to lift heavy payloads to space and the moon.
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