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Lady Bezos and Katy Perry's space flight was successful: an 11-minute trip

An all-female crew, consisting of Lauren Sanchez and five other VIP women, completed a suborbital space flight aboard Blue Origin's New Shepard vehicle

14 April 2025[Aggiornato il 14 aprile 2025, ore 15:08]

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Lauren Sanchez and five other VIP women on 14 April 2025, departing from a base in Texas, made a space journey aboard the New Shepard suborbital vehicle of Blue Origin, the private space company owned by Jeff Bezos, Sanchez's future spouse.

They became the first female-only space crew after the solo orbital flight of Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova in 1963.

"You have been our insurance," said fellow travellers to Lauren after the journalist and pilot, who will marry Amazon founder Jeff Bezos from 24 to 26 June. Jeff Bezos, in Venice, first revealed some trepidation about the flight that lasted 11 minutes.

Joining Lauren in the venture were CBS anchor Gayle King, former NASA scientist Aisha Bowe (both African American), singer Katy Perry, the activist Kerianne Flynn, the Vietnamese astrophysicist Amanda Nguyen whose dream of flying into space faded after the trauma she suffered when, as a Harvard student, she was a victim of rape.

From USA Today

We read in USA Today that the New Shepard - consisting of a rocket and a crew capsule totaling 18 metres in height - is named after astronaut Alan Shepard, the first American to go into space, and is designed to be completely reusable. In fact, the rocket returned to earth on its own after 7 minutes.

The capsule can accommodate up to six people; on board, the six passengers experienced a few minutes of weightlessness and admired incredible views of the Earth up to a height of about 100 km, that is, up to the Kármán line, the internationally recognised boundary of space.

Commercial space flights are what billionaire Jeff Bezos' space technology company has been offering since 2021, since the founder of Amazon himself boarded the spacecraft for its maiden manned voyage.

The spacecraft is the same one that 48 other women have already used to reach space in 10 previous manned space flights.

The New Shepard took off at supersonic speeds - and travelled at about 2,000 km/h (1,300 mph)- from Blue Origin's private ranch in Texas. This is the Corn ranch, known as Launch site one (Lso), a spaceport owned and operated by Blue Origin, located about 48 km north of the town of Van Horn, Texas.

How many Blue Origin flights have there been?

Blue Origin has carried out 30 missions, 10 of which have taken 52 people to the edge of space. Jeff Bezos was on the first manned flight of the spacecraft, NS-16, in 2021.

Spazio, la Blue Origin torna ai voli suborbitali umani con la missione Sn-25

The view from New Shepard

The passengers observed the earth from six windows, about 4 feet (120 centimetres) high, one for each occupant. Blue Origin says they are the largest windows in space and occupy a third of the cabin's surface area.