Blue Origin crew including Katy Perry, Lauren Sanchez returns safely after space launch

Broadcast journalist Gayle King and singer Katy Perry made a brief trip into space on Monday on a flight operated by Jeff Bezos’ private company, Blue Origin. It was the first time an all-female crew had been to space since 1963.

Their flight, on Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket, lasted 10 minutes and 21 seconds and took off from Blue Origin’s Launch Site One in West Texas, about 120 miles southeast of El Paso at 8:30 a.m. local time.

After the flight, King exited the crew capsule and said, “I would just like to have a moment with the ground,” before kneeling.

King had spoken before the launch about being afraid of the trip.

“I stepped out of my comfort zone in a way that I never thought was possible for me,” King said. “And now that I’ve done it, I really do feel I can take on anything, anything.”

King said that Perry sang “What a Wonderful World” during the flight.

“It’s not about singing my songs, it’s about a collective energy in there,” Perry said after they returned to Earth.

It was the 11th human flight for the New Shepard program, which had previously flown 52 people, including repeat astronauts, above the Kármán line, the internationally recognized boundary of space about 62 miles (100 kilometers) above Earth.

Flights on the New Shepard rocket, which provide for a few minutes of weightlessness, do not have a pilot.

Before the launch on Monday, “CBS Mornings” dedicated a large portion of its broadcast to “Gayle Goes to Space.” Between the show’s typical morning news updates, there was footage from Texas and interviews with people who had been to space, including on Blue Origin flights.

Family members and friends of the flight’s passengers gathered in Texas to watch the launch, including Oprah Winfrey, King’s close friend. Kris Jenner, the matriarch of the Kardashian family, and her daughter, Khloé Kardashian, were also in the crowd.

Bezos’ fiancée, Lauren Sánchez, a former broadcast journalist, was also on board the flight, called the NS-31 mission. The couple’s wedding is reportedly set for this summer in Venice.

The other passengers were Aisha Bowe, a former rocket scientist at NASA who told Elle magazine that she is the first person of Bahamian heritage to go to space; Kerianne Flynn, a film producer; and Amanda Nguyen, a bioastronautics research scientist and prominent advocate for sexual assault survivors.

Nguyen was the first Vietnamese woman to go to space, according to Blue Origin.

“It’s a dream come true, and for me it was a dream deferred,” Nguyen told Elle.

She said that she had worked at NASA and studied astrophysics, but turned her focus to activism after she was sexually assaulted.

“Gender-based violence is a big reason why so many women in STEM don’t continue on with their training, and I was one of those women,” she said, referring to science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

It was the first spaceflight to have an all-female crew since Valentina Tereshkova flew solo in 1963 for the Soviet Union on the Vostok 6 and became the first woman to reach space.

But some critics have chafed at the suggestion that the all-female crew represented a moment of feminist progress. The New Shepard program, the centerpiece of Blue Origin’s space tourism business, is an avenue for the wealthy, powerful and well-connected to go to space.

Olivia Munn, an actress, called the trip “a bit gluttonous” during a guest hosting appearance on “Today with Jenna & Friends” this month.

“I know this is not the cool thing to say, but there are so many other things that are so important in the world right now,” Munn said. “What are you guys going to do up in space?”

In an interview on “CBS Mornings” aired on Friday, a host, Vladimir Duthiers, asked King if she was concerned that the flight was an advertisement for Bezos, the founder of Amazon. Duthiers noted that Bezos has been under scrutiny because of business practices at Amazon and his ownership of The Washington Post.

Warehouse workers and delivery drivers for Amazon have complained about unsafe working conditions. In 2023, the Federal Trade Commission and 17 states sued Amazon, accusing it of protecting a monopoly over online retail.

At The Washington Post, there has been a wave of resignations in recent months amid concerns about leadership, including Bezos’ decision to reorient the newspaper’s opinion section to advocate “personal liberties and free markets.”

“Listen, it is troubling to me, too,” King said. “There have been some questions and decisions that he’s made that I’ve actually gone, ‘Huh?’”

“But I think in this particular case, Vlad, this is so much bigger than one man and one company,” she continued. “I’ve chosen to separate the two.”

Bezos has spent billions of dollars on Blue Origin and has spoken about how he envisions a future where humans live in colonies in space. He was on Blue Origin’s first suborbital passenger flight in 2021.

The New Shepard rocket is named after Alan Shepard, the first American to reach space in 1961 and one of the astronauts who walked on the moon.