TV personality Gayle King, former NASA scientist Aisha Bowe, journalist Lauren Sanchez, research scientist Amanda Nguyen, singer Katy Perry and film producer Kerianne Flynn before their flight.
Image: Twitter
IT WAS T-minus 7 minutes and 50 seconds to the Monday launch of the all-women suborbital flight via Blue Origin, the private space company founded by Jeff Bezos.
Kris Jenner, Khloé Kardashian and Orlando Bloom were among those watching from the West Texas sidelines.
“This is bigger than just going to space,” said onlooker Oprah Winfrey.
Winfrey described passenger Gayle King’s profound anxiety during air travel. “This is overcoming a wall of fear, a barrier; I think it’s going to be cathartic in many ways for her,” she said.
How very on-brand for Winfrey to characterize one’s own emotional journey as bigger than space itself. And how very on-brand for the entire spectacle of the New Shepard rocket, which launched at 9:30 a.m. Eastern and safely returned its six female passengers to Earth a little more than 10 minutes later.
Kristin Fisher, a space journalist who co-anchored the live stream, marveled at how much the culture of space travel had changed since 1979, when Tom Wolfe coined the term “The Right Stuff” to describe the extreme stoicism expected of the all-White, all-male astronauts in the early U.S. space program.
“They all had to have the right stuff, you could never talk about nerves or being nervous or your feelings or stuff like that, that was the wrong stuff,” Fisher said. “But now, in 2025, it is the right stuff.”
Emotions were certainly welcome at this launch. Winfrey, wearing a canary yellow sweater in honor of King’s call sign “Sunshine,” wiped away tears as she watched the craft ascend. So did Forester Bowe, the 92-year old grandfather of Aisha Bowe, a former NASA scientist who was also aboard the spacecraft.
Three minutes and 37 seconds after launch, Ariane Cornell, Blue Origin’s vice president of in-space systems and co-host of the live stream, said, “Welcome to space, ladies. Or shall I say ‘astronauts’?”
The craft had passed the so-called Kármán line, the term used to describe the boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and space.
Right on cue, someone shouted, “Look at the moon!”
“Oh, my Goddess!” screamed Katy Perry. “Oh, my Goddess!”
Minutes later, when the capsule was in free fall, headed back to Earth following four minutes of zero-G conditions, Perry made good on her promise to sing.
King said that the team had asked her to belt out one of her hits like “Roar” or “Firework.” Instead, Perry opted for “What a Wonderful World,” the Louis Armstrong song.
“She said, ‘It’s not about me, it’s about the world,’” King said. “Isn’t that nice?”
That is nice. The idea that this event was about more than the experiences of six women in close proximity to power and money was invoked many times during the mission’s live stream, hosted on Space.com courtesy of Blue Origin.
In press materials, Blue Origin hyped the historic weight of an all-female crew that included “the first Vietnamese and Southeast Asian woman astronaut.”
That’s a notable bit of text, considering that Blue Origin recently edited its website, scrubbing references to its “commitment to diversity” and softening language from “a culture of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging” to a “commitment to inclusivity.” (Blue Origin didn’t respond to The Post’s request for comment.)
But if anyone was thinking about any of this during the launch, it certainly didn’t come up in the live stream.
“It’s such a reminder of how we want to do better and be better,” King said in her on-camera debrief.
She was speaking globally - literally, she was looking at the globe - but much was made on the live stream of King overcoming her own personal anxieties on this mission. The fact that King was too scared to get her ears pierced came up repeatedly.
Bezos’s fiancée, Lauren Sánchez, was the first one off the craft, holding a little stuffed animal. “Where are my babies?” she asked, presumably referring to her three children. Perry hoisted a daisy to the sky in honor of her 4-year-old daughter Daisy, who was on-site to watch the launch. King dropped to her knees; Perry kissed the dirt.
Earthiness was a theme throughout the live stream, perhaps a bit ironic for an event that looks skyward. Bezos, who owns The Post, was in “just folks” drag, looking jacked in jeans and a T-shirt, his boots kicking up dust as he walked.
Bezos and Sánchez’s friend Jenner seemed dressed for the West Texas landscape in a brown leather coat worn over a brown blazer under a wide-brimmed black cowboy hat.
Jenner’s daughter Khloé was also in shades of brown, opting for a full-length leopard print coat. “It’s such a big day in history and it’s so empowering,” Kardashian said before the launch.
Kardashian seems to have understood the assignment. The word “history” was invoked over and over during the live stream, often with a reminder that this was the first all-female space mission since 1963, when the Russian cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova orbited the Earth alone for three days.
And the entire premise of the mission was that we viewers were to also share in the tears and pride of these six extraordinary women.
Watching a rocket take off is always exciting. It’s inherently a good narrative. There’s a literal countdown! And a big explosion! And then a giant piece of equipment flies into the air! It’s such a cool feat of engineering that one can almost forget that the craft looks a whole lot like a Hitachi Magic Wand.
The best part came on the capsule’s descent. It was hard not to smile when hearing the tinny audio of the crew screaming as their capsule free-fell to Earth. It captured the absurdity and enormity of space travel, and space travel touches on the absurdity and enormity of the human condition.
But before and after that moment, the results were mixed.
Watching Bezos literally open the door for Sánchez was a bit of a Rorschach. This could be seen as a cosmic act of chivalry, a real-life moment straight out of a Hallmark movie with a punny title about a star on a Christmas tree. Or it could be seen as a whole other story, about a couple enjoying a seemingly unlimited amount of power and wealth. (Either tale draws its own kind of audience, with both fans and hate-watchers.)
It was a great choice to have the camera capture each woman head-to-toe as she emerged. The spacesuits, newly redesigned by Monse, nodded to the retro-futurism of the 1970s. And those flared pants, flapping in the West Texas wind, managed to merge utilitarianism with playfulness.
Listening to the crew’s postflight interviews was a bit like hearing from a rich friend in high school who just came back from one of those pricey “leadership camps” overseas meant to beef up your college applications. You’re happy for them. To an extent.
During the live stream, Fisher seemed to try to disabuse skeptical viewers of their cynicism. “It’s missions like this that really begin the process of opening up space to everyone, for all of humanity,” she said. “That’s what today is about.”
But wait! There’s more!
The live stream ended with a message from Blue Origin’s Cornell.
“If you would like to follow in the pioneering footsteps of these astronauts and purchase a seat to space, visit blueorigin.com and click ‘fly to space,’” she said. “Your own journey to visit the Kármán line is closer than you think.” She also helpfully mentioned that there were commemorative patches for sale.
The refundable deposit for a Blue Origin space journey is $150,000. Price of a patch: $7.50.
Caroline O’Donovan contributed to this report.