History has been made as Katy Perry, Gayle King, Lauren Sanchez, and three other women became the first-ever all female crew to visit space. Also aboard the flight was research scientist Amanda Nguyen, filmmaker Kerianne Flynn, and NASA rocket scientist Aisha Bowe.
✨ Weightless and limitless. pic.twitter.com/GQgHd0aw7i
— Blue Origin (@blueorigin) April 14, 2025
The star-studded launch lifted off Monday morning from West Texas, as the women embarked on about an 11-minute spaceflight some 60 miles above the earth before returning safely aboard a Blue Origin capsule.
Perry kissed the ground after exiting the capsule, later saying the experience was enlightening.
"I think this experience has shown me you never know how much love is inside of you, like, how much love you have to give, and how loved you are," she said.
King echoed those sentiments, saying the trip was a "reminder that we need to do better, be better human beings."
The mission was planned by the private space company Blue Origin, which is owned by Amazon founder and billionaire Jeff Bezos — who also happens to be Sanchez's fiancee. It marked Blue Origin's 31st spaceflight, and its 11th to carry humans.
WATCH | Crew back on earth after all-female spaceflight
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Blue Origin has been ferrying paying customers up to space since 2021. The company doesn't publicly list its prices, but a deposit for one of the seats on this latest launch were $150,000.
While this is technically the first all-female crew to fly into space, the former Soviet Union did send one woman — Valentina Tereshokova — into space on a solo mission back in 1963. Otherwise, men have been a part of every other space launch, meaning this all-female launch marks a new chapter in space exploration history.
"It's a natural progression from a few years ago where we had the 1st all-female spacewalk, which we like to call an 'unmanned walk,'" said Kimberly Robinson, director at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center. "And so it's great. I think it's a natural progression of things that as women get more and more into the [Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics] fields, that we see them doing more things and getting into more leadership positions and making up in an entire crew."
"I think it's extremely encouraging," Robinson added. "Especially to the women in the nation, but it also is just encouraging in general that space continues to open up its frontiers to more and more people as time goes by."
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Women do, meanwhile, still have other barriers to break when it comes to space exploration. For example, NASA has sent more than a dozen men to the moon, but never a woman.
The agency plans to change that with the upcoming missions from the Artemis program, which intends to have the first woman — astronaut Christina Koch — orbit the moon in deep space. That mission is set for launch in April 2026.
