Breaking the Gender Barrier May Be New for Space Tourism—But Not for NASA Missions

Nobody will be giving out any medals now that Blue Origin’s eleventh crewed space flight is in the books. The brief suborbital sojourn lifted off this morning, April 14, at 8:30 a.m. CDT and landed just 11 minutes later. There was certainly news coverage but not the kind of global audience that has attended other crewed space launches.

That’s not the way it was on May 5, 1961, when NASA astronaut Alan Shepard flew a similar flight profile—a popgun trajectory above the atmosphere and a landing just a few hundred miles down range—becoming the first American in space. Shepard earned instant celebrity, visiting President John Kennedy at the White House three days later to receive NASA’s Distinguished Service Medal. Since then, more than 700 people have flown to space, crossing the 50-mile altitude line that was originally considered the boundary between the terrestrial and the extraterrestrial. (In the 1960s, the bar was raised a little bit, to 100 km, or 62 miles, establishing the so-called Kármán line, after the Hungarian-American physicist and engineer Theodore von Kármán.) Blue Origin alone has so far lofted 52 people above the Kármán line over the course of 10 flights since 2021.

But this next flight, the company says, will be special—thanks to the composition of the crew. Aboard the New Shepard spacecraft will be six people, including pop star Katy Perry; television personality Gayle King; journalist Lauren Sánchez, who is also engaged to Jeff Bezos, founder of both Amazon and Blue Origin; filmmaker Kerianne Flynn; bioastronautics researcher and advocate for sexual violence survivors—and a TIME Woman of the Year—Amanda Nguyen; and former NASA rocket scientist and CEO of the engineering firm STEMboard, Aisha Bowe. 

Female astronauts have become commonplace enough that the fact that the crew is composed entirely of women doesn’t immediately cause a sensation. But the fact is, this is the first time since the Soviet Union’s Valentina Tereshkova flew to orbit alone aboard the Vostok 6 spacecraft in 1963 that no men at all have been aboard a crewed ship.

"These women are so badass…they have such amazing life stories, all that they've accomplished," King said on CBS Mornings. "This was never my dream. It was never my dream. And somebody said, ‘Maybe you need to have new dreams, Gayle.’"

“If you had told me that I would be part of the first ever all-female crew in space, I would have believed you,” Perry posted on Facebook. “Nothing was beyond my imagination as a child. I can show all of the youngest & most vulnerable among us to reach for the stars, literally and figuratively. I am honored to be among this diverse group of celestial sisters.”

In an email blast inviting journalists to cover the launch, Blue Origin refers to the mission’s “epic crew.”

But is this really news—or is there at least a whiff of condescension in making a fuss about the fact that a group of women are flying without a man to keep them company? Tereshkova’s flight was 62 years ago. Sally Ride became the first American woman in space 42 years ago. Eileen Collins became the first female shuttle commander 26 years ago. Peggy Whitson became the first female commander of the International Space Station (ISS) 18 years ago. As for NASA’s current record holder for longest cumulative time in space? Whitson again, at 675 days.

In 2019, NASA made much hay when astronauts Jessica Meir and Christina Koch performed the first all-female spacewalk and by then the whole idea of marking these moments started to seem old.

“Oh I could tell you tales from bygone days of the male engineers’ original ideas of clothing and hygiene products for women astronauts,” wrote retired five-time shuttle astronaut Marsha Ivins for TIME in 2019. “[B]ut we are talking the late ’70s, early ‘80s. By the time I flew in space in the ‘90s, those things had changed; they’d evolved, emerged, progressed and been accommodated for. By then a crew member was just a crew member. The same is true today…Not a big deal. So why the continued insistence on making it a big deal?”

Ivins feels much the same about the Blue Origin flight. “​​It was in the mid-1990s … that someone came up with the media stunt to fly an all women shuttle flight,” she wrote in an email to TIME. “It was floated to the women in the office and we all said, ‘oh HELL no!’ Personally I found the whole concept insulting. We were always part of a crew, working together to ensure the success of a mission, gender had exactly zero to do with it.”

Not that career astronauts see no merit at all in the flights Blue Origin makes. “Space tourist flights like Blue Origin’s New Shepard are positive in so many ways,” writes retired astronaut and former ISS commander Terry Virts in an email. “They support the burgeoning commercial space industry, and they allow more humans to see our beautiful planet from outer space and experience the amazing sensation of weightlessness.”

The key nouns here are “tourists” and “humans,” not “men” or “women” or, significantly, “astronauts.” Passengers aboard a New Shepard ship pay for the privilege of flying, and while Blue Origin does not go public with what a ticket costs, the company does require that a refundable $150,000 deposit accompany an initial application to go aloft.

All the same, it does take at least a little courage and a bit of grit to make a New Shepard flight. The rocket reaches a velocity of over 2,200 mph, or close to Mach 3, on the way up, plunges back through the atmosphere like a cannonball after a few minutes of weightlessness, and depends on a parachute to bring the passengers home safely—not the kind of chances every traveler would want to take. But that risk applies to everyone equally—with the physics of the flight not giving a fig about who’s in the seat.