Agency Report
Pop superstar Katy Perry and “CBS Mornings” anchor Gayle King were among the six passengers Monday on an all-female voyage into to the edge of space via Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space travel business.
Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket soared into space after blastoff from the company’s West Texas launch facility at 9:30 a.m. ET on Monday.
The eight-minute flight traveled more than 62 miles into the atmosphere, past the Kármán line, which per Blue Origin is the “internationally recognized boundary of space.” Blue Origin promises passengers in its burgeoning space tourism business that the trip offers the chance to experience “several minutes of weightlessness and witnessing life-changing views of Earth.” The module containing the astronauts, suspended from three parachutes, landed several minutes after the rocket.
The New Shepard rocket operates autonomously without a pilot. Joining Perry and King are Bezos’ fiance, journalist and philanthropist Lauren Sánchez, engineer and NASA veteran Aisha Bowe, activist and scientist Amanda Nguyen and movie producer Kerianne Flynn. The launch is designed to bring attention to women in aeronautics.
“I gotta sing in space,” Perry posted on Instagram on Sunday. But when asked about that comment during a pre-recorded CBS interview with all of the new astronauts, she said, “It won’t be about me, it will be about this beautiful Earth. I think from up there, we will think ‘Oh my God, we have to protect our mother.’”
Perry — or possibly another astronaut — did indeed sing during the flight, although what she was singing was unclear.
King told CBS News, “I’ve made no secret of the fact that I’m very nervous but also very excited.”
The TV coverage cut included footage of people on the ground cheering as the rocket took off and gained altitude. After a a couple of minutes it broke the sound barrier and entered the atmosphere.
The astronauts were heard marveling at the sight of the moon.
Bezos, founder and chairman of Amazon, was the first to greet the astronauts after landing; he popped open the hatch with a wrench and greeted Sanchez. Perry was next out of the capsule; she knelt and kissed the sandy ground. King emerged and did the same.
launched Blue Origin in 2000. The venture made its first flight in July 2021 with passengers that included Bezos and Wally Funk, a pioneering female astronaut who trained as part of NASA’s Mercury program in the 1960s.
The gravity of the event was reflected by a comment from one announcer, who said after the landing, “It’s truly remarkable that all these people on the ground have been looking up at the sky for the past several minutes — and no one’s been looking at their phone.”
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