On 14 April 2025, Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket carried six women beyond the Kármán line, the first time its capsule had flown with an all-women crew. The launch webcast introduces the six astronauts: Lauren Sánchez, Katy Perry, Amanda Nguyen, Aisha Bowe, Gayle King and Kerianne Flynn.
Six women, six stories
Lauren Sánchez, a journalist and pilot, spoke about her dyslexia and the teacher who diagnosed it, invited to watch the launch. Her message to anyone told they do not belong: “If you’re there, you belong there.” Katy Perry took a daisy for her four-year-old daughter, Daisy, and almost 300 bracelets for the children supported by her Firework Foundation.
Amanda Nguyen, a research scientist and advocate for survivors of sexual violence, became the first Vietnamese and Southeast Asian woman astronaut. Ringing the bell before boarding, she thought of members of her family who fled on a refugee boat, using the stars to navigate. “My healing takes me to the stars,” she said. Aisha Bowe, a former NASA rocket scientist of Bahamian heritage, went from community college to space; a girl she began mentoring at 13 now works on the rocket engine that flew her. Journalist Gayle King admitted to being nervous. Kerianne Flynn, a film producer involved in fair pay advocacy, hoped to inspire her son.
Eleven minutes
The crew trained for two days. On launch day, New Shepard, whose hydrogen and oxygen engine produces water vapour, climbed past three times the speed of sound. After engine cut-off, the capsule separated and passed 100 kilometres, giving the astronauts about four minutes of weightlessness and a view of the almost full moon. The booster landed vertically near the launch pad, and the capsule descended under three parachutes to a soft landing in the West Texas desert.
Back on Earth
Katy Perry and Gayle King knelt to kiss the ground; Perry raised her daisy to the sky. Lauren Sánchez, asking for her children, described the silence of space and an Earth that felt “really alive”: “We’re all in this together.”
One of the webcast hosts, journalist Kristin Fisher, recalled that her mother, Anna Fisher, was among NASA’s first six women astronauts, and that it took two and a half years for all six of them to fly. On NS-31, six women flew in a single morning.