The historic all-female crew of Blue Origin’s NS-31 has finally achieved lift off! The New Shepard rocket, which has been teased for months, is blasting off now from West Texas.
Its crew includes Blue Origin owner Jeff Bezos’ fiancée Lauren Sánchez, singer Katy Perry, CBS anchor Gayle King, former NASA rocket scientist Aisha Bowe, civil rights activist Amanda Nguyen and film producer Kerianne Flynn.
The entire flight is only expected to last 11 minutes. “I called Katy,” Gayle recalled during an interview with Elle. “We had been on the phone for 36 minutes, and I’d asked her 50 million questions, until finally she said, ‘Could I just interrupt for a second? Are you aware that our flight is going to be shorter than this freaking phone call?'”
“I don’t have any time to be nervous; I ain’t got time to be worried,” Katy quipped. “I’m going to feel something when they go, ’10, 9, 8, 7,…’ but until then we’ve got stuff to do. We’ve got business to handle.”
Lauren as well told the publication: “All of these women are storytellers in their own right. They’re going to go up to space and be able to spread what they felt in different ways.”
Aisha continued: “I read a stat that there’s a huge majority of middle school girls who decide not to pursue STEM fields, although they otherwise would have been interested, because they see them as male-dominated fields.”
“So this representation really matters. It’s people seeing themselves and being able to show up authentically in their careers in the future.”
“I thought, About time,” Amanda joked. “It’s a dream come true, and for me it was a dream deferred. I worked at NASA, I studied the stars – astrophysics at Harvard and MIT – but life got in the way.”
“Gender-based violence is a big reason why so many women in STEM don’t continue on with their training, and I was one of those women,” she continued. “After I was sexually assaulted, I traded my telescope to fight for my rights as a sexual assault survivor.”
“I drafted the Sexual Assault Survivors’ Bill of Rights, passed it in Congress and at the United Nations. And then, after 10 years, I was like, I want to honor the person that I was before I was hurt.”
Kerianne concluded by saying: “I’ve been waiting to do this for a long time. I grew up in a small town in Michigan, and I always looked up at the stars with my grandfather. He would talk about celestial events and explain the astronomy of the sky.”
“I wondered, What is out there, and what is up there? But going through the rest of my life—my career, my education—it just didn’t seem like something that was attainable. So when this opportunity came along, especially to be part of a historic all-female crew, I felt honored and excited. I can’t wait to touch down on Earth and share what we bring back with the world.”
Follow along for their space journey…
Read the full article here
