The team of astronauts blasted off from West Texas at 9:31 a.m. ET (1331 GMT) and flew to the boundary of space, where they felt weightless for a matter of seconds before landing back on Earth in a flight that lasted about 11 minutes, per a live Blue Origin broadcast of the spaceflight venture led by billionaire Jeff Bezos.
The space trip was a media splash success for Bezos’ New Shepard space launch vehicle, which has been designed for commercial space tourism.
The six-crew team included Bezos’ fiancée Lauren Sanchez, CBS host Gayle King, ex-Nasa rocket scientist Aisha Bowe, scientist Amanda Nguyen and Hollywood film producer Kerianne Flynn.
King reported that when the crew returned to seat after weightlessness, Perry had sung the Louis Armstrong tune “What a Wonderful World.”
“I am totally in love with love,” Katy Perry commented upon returning to Earth.Perry was cradling a daisy, a flower she brought along into space, as a reminder of her daughter, Daisy.Among the celebrities on hand at the launch pad were tearful Oprah Winfrey, a close friend of King’s, and entertainment industry figures Kris Jenner and Khloe Kardashian.
It was the first all-woman space mission since Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space, orbited Earth in a nearly three-day solo mission in 1963.Blue Origin doesn’t reveal the average price of a seat on one of its rockets. On its website, the company states prospective passengers must pay $150,000 in the form of a refundable deposit to initiate the “order process.”
In 2021, the firm disclosed the top bid for a seat on its New Shepard spacecraft was $28 million. In that same year, “Star Trek” star William Shatner traveled for free as a guest of Blue Origin.
In 2018, Reuters reported that the firm would charge passengers a minimum of $200,000 for the ride.Blue Origin indicates on its website that it hopes to transform the cost of getting to space, with rockets of the company built with reusability.Loizos Heracleous, a professor of strategy and organization at the Warwick Business School in Britain, estimates the cost of each launch of the New Shepard at $1 to $3 million.
“Even aside from development expense, there are six seats so each one would have to cough up half a million USD for this to be a financially feasible repeat business,” Heracleous said. “It will be a long long while before space travel can be a financially viable business offered to the public at large.”
