On April 14, 2025, the first ever all women crew set up into space for about a total of an 11 minute flight. This flight was created by the company Blue Origin Enterprises, which is an American space technology company, headquartered in Kent, Washington. This company operates the suborbital New Shepard rocket and the heavy-lift New Glenn Rocket.
The Blue Origin’s New Shepard program enables citizens to experience space via a reusable suborbital rocket system. The rocket “New Shepard,” which is named after Alan Shepard, will carry passengers to an altitude of about 63 miles or higher, which would cross the Kármán line, the internationally recognized boundary of space. The New Shepard is also a suborbital rocket system designed for human spaceflight. The flight on Monday itself was around 11 minutes long, and would allow the Passengers to experience the weightlessness and breathtaking view of Earth.
This flight was also an all women crew. The people who took flight Monday were Jeff Bezos’ fiancé, Lauren Sanchez. The flight also included former NASA rocket scientist Aisha Bowe, and a bioastronautics research scientist Amanda Nguyen, a filmmaker, Kerianna Flynn, and singer Katy Perry. This also included Gayle King, a TY journalist.
The day they took flight, they were in about Zero G for about four minutes, before they had to return to their seats and prepare for landing. The reality of this flight is, although it was branded as space, they only went up to the Kármán line, which would give the feeling of zero g’s while at that point. I asked Emerson Stanley if she would ever want to go to space, and she responded saying “Yes, because it sounds like it would be fun, and be able to get to float around and basically fly.” When the group of women came down, Perry and King kissed the ground.
While this trip can sound cool to others, this flight has sparked some controversy. The Blue Origin Space flight has been shared that interested space tourists must put down a $150,000 deposit, but the company did not share information about the total cost of a ticket. Although, a ticket for a seat on one of Blue Origin’s first flights went at auction for about $28 million. With this, people are now rising with the question of “space tourism.”
Another rising controversy, includes the model and actress Emily Ratajkowski. A few hours after the space flight took place, she took her opinion of the mission to social media. She went on to criticize those who were involved with the flight. She would go on to say “Saying that you care about Mother Earth, and it’s about Mother Earth”…”and you are going up in a spaceship that is built and paid for by a company that’s single handedly destroying the planet?” She also went on to add: “ Look at the state of the world and think about how many resources went into putting these women into space. For what? What was the marketing there?” With this, she is concerned that this will also turn into something that could be normalized or become more popular, however, there are a lot more important things to do for the earth and environment at the moment.
