Today, at 9:30 am Eastern Standard Time, Blue Origin Space Flight NS-31 will take off from Van Horn, Texas, with an all-female crew that includes Lauren Sánchez, Katy Perry, and Gayle King. Its destination? The Kármán line—or the boundary where Earth’s atmosphere meets outer space.
The launch has attracted immense public interest. Part of it is because of the celebrity presence—Sanchez, Perry, and King are all well-known global figures who posed on the cover of Elle ahead of the launch. (“We are going to put the ‘ass’ in astronaut,” Perry told the magazine.) But part of it is because Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin, along with Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, are pioneers in space tourism, allowing people other than astronauts to journey to the edges of the Earth. Plus, extraterrestrial exploration has captivated American society since the days of the space race: As President John F. Kennedy said in his famous address to Congress in 1961: “Space is open to us now; and our eagerness to share its meaning is not governed by the efforts of others.”
Below, everything you need to know about the all-female Blue Origin space flight.
What Is Blue Origin?
Blue Origin is an American space technology company founded by Jeff Bezos. Also the co-founder of Amazon, Bezos is the second-richest person in the world with a net worth of over $200 billion.
“Space technology” is a broad term, but in summary, Blue Origin seeks to make space flight accessible to all, rather than just trained astronauts. (Or at least to those who can afford it: in 2021, a Dutch teenager named Oliver Daemen paid an astonishing $28 million to fly on a Blue Origin flight, according to The New York Times. $19 million of which was donated to charity.) They build their own rockets. And on those rockets, they send people to space.
Blue Origin also hopes to study, and eventually harness, different materials found in space such as lunar dust or ice on the Moon’s south pole.
What Are the Different Blue Origin Rockets?
Currently, Blue Origin has two operational rockets: New Shepherd and New Glenn.
New Shepherd does sub-orbital flights—or, flights that technically enter space but do not orbit around the earth. It will primarily be used for space tourism. New Glenn, however, has the ability to do heavy-load orbital space flights.
