Next New Shepard Has Star-Studded, All-Female Crew

Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin has announced the crew of its next New Shepard suborbital mission, NS-31. The passengers are all female and include CBS journalist Gayle King, pop superstar Katy Perry, and Bezos’s fiancée Lauren Sánchez who “brought the mission together.”  The launch will take place at an unspecified time this spring.  Blue Origin just completed the NS-30 flight with six passengers two days ago.

Blue Origin trumpets the mission as the first all-female flight crew since Valentina Tereshkova. Tereshkova made a solo flight on Vostok 6 in 1963, becoming the first woman in space.  Many women have flown to space since then, but always as part of crews that included men.

King, Perry and Sánchez will be joined by Aisha Bowe, Kerianne Flynn and Amanda Nguyen.

Bowe is an aerospace engineer who spent part of her career at NASA’s Ames Research Center and is an advocate for STEM education and now is CEO of STEMBoard and founder of LINGO. Flynn’s career began in fashion and human resources, but more recently she produced two films about women — This Changes Everything (2018) and LILLY (2024) about Lilly Ledbetter. Nyugen, a bioastronautics research scientist who was a NASA intern in 2011 and 2013, advocates for victims of sexual violence through her nonprofit organization Rise. A sexual violence survivor herself, she was one of TIME’s Women of the Year in 2022 and will be the first Vietnamese woman in space (Pham Tuân was the first Vietnamese in space on a Soviet mission to the Salyut 6 space station in 1980).

NS-31 will be New Shepard’s 31st flight and the 11th to carry passengers. Bezos and his brother, Mark, were aboard the first passenger flight in 2021.

New Shepard is a reusable rocket that lifts off from a launch pad in West Texas and sends a capsule with as many as six passengers above the “von Kármán line” at 100 kilometers (62 miles) altitude that is internationally recognized as the demarcation between air and space. After the rocket and capsule separate, the rocket returns to Earth, landing vertically on a pad about two miles away, while the capsule floats down under parachutes to a soft landing in the desert. The trip takes about 10 minutes.

Because they go above the von Kármán line, the passengers are considered astronauts even though they did not go into orbit.

The first U.S. astronaut, Alan Shepard (after whom the rocket is named), similarly did not go into orbit in May 1961 nor did Gus Grissom three months later. Eight X-15 pilots also earned astronaut wings flying that aircraft. The Air Force, NASA, the FAA and others use a lower threshold, 80 km (50 mi), for the dividing line.

The first U.S. astronaut to orbit the Earth was John  Glenn in February 1962.  Blue Origin’s orbital rocket, New Glenn, completed its first launch last month.

The NS-30 passenger flight just took place two days ago.

NS-30 liftoff! ???? pic.twitter.com/6lcKhc0Rt8

— Blue Origin (@blueorigin) February 25, 2025

It also carried six passengers, one of whom declined to be publicly identified even though he appeared in a group photo and was seen getting out of the capsule at the end of the mission. His flight suit is labeled “R. Wilson” and the crew patch includes the name Wilson along with the other five:  Spanish TV host Jesús Calleja, a physician (Richard Scott), the co-head of research at a hedge fund (Tushar Shah), an entrepreneur (Elaine Chia Hyde, the only woman on the flight), and a cybersecurity businessman on his second New Shepard flight (Lane Bess).