Blue Origin NS-31

Blue Origin NS-31 was a sub-orbital flight under the company’s New Shepard space tourism program. It launched on April 14, 2025, and lasted 10 minutes and 21 seconds. The mission carried an all-female crew, organized by journalist Lauren Sánchez, who was then engaged to Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos. The passengers were Sánchez, NASA aerospace engineer Aisha Bowe, pop singer Katy Perry, film producer Kerianne Flynn, civil rights activist Amanda Nguyen, and journalist Gayle King. The flight attracted significant media coverage as the first all-female spaceflight with more than one woman, and the first all-female crewed spaceflight since the solo mission of Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova on Vostok 6 in 1963.

The six-person mission was the eleventh launch of Blue Origin’s New Shepard program, which uses remotely piloted rockets to carry a passenger capsule into sub-orbital space. Sánchez organized the flight, and its passengers were announced on February 27, 2025. Nguyen had previously trained as an astronaut but shifted to activism after being sexually assaulted. New “spacesuits” designed for women were created by the fashion house Monse, though like other New Shepard flights, these suits were not functional for protection against decompression. NS-31 marked the first spaceflight with only female passengers since 1963. Nguyen became the first woman of Vietnamese descent, and Bowe the first Bahamian person, to reach space.

The flight lifted off from the Blue Origin Launch Site southeast of El Paso, Texas, on April 14, 2025, at 13:30:00 UTC (8:30 am CDT). It lasted 10 minutes and 21 seconds, including a few minutes of weightlessness, and crossed the Kármán line, the recognized edge of space. During the flight, Perry sang part of Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World” and held a piece of paper with the setlist for her upcoming The Lifetimes Tour, along with a daisy in tribute to her daughter. The capsule landed safely in a desert about 11 minutes after liftoff, where a ground crew including Bezos greeted them. Among those present were Khloe Kardashian, Kris Jenner, Oprah Winfrey, and Mae Jemison.

The mission drew largely negative reactions. Some critics argued that framing it as a feminist milestone was undermined by Bezos’s political donations to Republican candidates who oppose abortion rights.