Jeff Bezos is blasting his bride-to-be Lauren Sánchez and her “guests” to space on Monday – a plan that might, under other circumstances, contain mixed messages.
A crew of six women – Amanda Nguyen, a civil rights activist who will become the first Vietnamese woman to fly to space; the CBS Mornings co-host Gayle King; the pop star Katy Perry; film producer Kerianne Flynn; entrepreneur and former Nasa rocket scientist Aisha Bowe; and Sánchez, a journalist and philanthropist – will blast off on Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket from the company’s launch site, 30 miles north of Van Horn, Texas, on an 11-minute, suborbital flight to the edge of space and back.
Though billed as the first all-female crew to reach the Kármán line, the internationally recognised boundary of space at an altitude of 62 miles, it is not technically so: the cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova flew a solo mission to space in 1963.
But Tereshkova didn’t blast off with the accoutrements afforded the new ladies of space. “We’re a crew!” they reportedly shouted in unison at a photoshoot for Elle magazine, each rocking “an all-black power look”. The magazine noted that this will be the first time anyone has been to space with their hair and makeup done.
“Who would not get glam before the flight?” Sánchez remarked. Perry added: “Space is going to finally be glam. Let me tell you something. If I could take glam up with me, I would do that. We are going to put the ‘ass’ in astronaut.”
But trips like these raise questions: are they anything more than joy rides – and do they need to be? King said she “had a lot of trepidation – I still do – but I also know it’s very interesting to be terrified and excited at the same time. I haven’t felt like this since childbirth. Because I knew childbirth was going to hurt. But it’s also stepping out of your comfort zone.”
The actor William Shatner, aka Captain James T Kirk of the Starship Enterprise, took one of the first flights on Bezos’s rocket at the age of 90 in 2021. He said he was surprised by his own reaction to the experience – and moved to tears. “When I looked in the opposite direction, into space, there was no mystery, no majestic awe to behold ... All I saw was death. I saw a cold, dark, black emptiness. It was unlike any blackness you can see or feel on Earth. It was deep, enveloping, all-encompassing. It was among the strongest feelings of grief I have ever encountered,” he added.
For Bezos, however, the all-female trip may be more than a curated joyride in a rocket that flies itself. The Amazon co-founder is locked in a competitive commercial space launch industry battle with Elon Musk. Rockets from Musk’s Space X Falcon 9 family have launched 469 times. By contrast, Blue Origin has completed a mere 31 successful launches of its New Shepard vehicle, including 11 crewed suborbital flights.
Earlier this year, Blue Origin launched its larger, reusable rocket, New Glenn (named after John Glenn, the first American to orbit Earth) from Cape Canaveral in Florida. The company says this operates like a “commercial airliner (but with cleaner fuel)”, will lead to “significantly less waste and cost” and can carry 13 metric tons to geostationary transfer orbit and 45 metric tons to low Earth orbit.
Nevertheless, Blue Origin remains in second place in this space battle. The leader, SpaceX, currently builds and launches two rockets: the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy. A feature of these rockets has been the development of booster stages that return to Earth for refurbishment, a revolutionary process which saves money and has helped SpaceX undercut competitors.
The company also builds and flies Dragon, the space capsule that can carry crew and cargo to the International Space Station, and is working on a large rocket and spacecraft system called Starship that will be able to carry massive payloads to space. Starship may even carry astronauts to Mars and set up colonies there, if Musk gets his way.
“As it stands, Musk’s SpaceX is the competition’s undisputed leader: it regularly sends astronauts into orbit, while Bezos’s Blue Origin has yet to launch anyone beyond the outer edge of space,” Politico recently noted.
SpaceX and Blue Origin have clashed in court over billions of dollars in government funding, and the billionaires themselves traded barbs on the Musk-owned X, with Musk rivals worried that he is aiming to create a monopoly in the private space industry.
“People are concerned what’s in place to stop it,” said one space industry lobbyist. “You’re talking about two of the most unpredictable people in the world getting together. It’s not [a case of] chocolate and peanut butter, and you get a great combination. You’re talking about world dominance here.”
Blue Origin is trying to raise alarms about potential unfair advantages in the space race, Politico reported. “Elon wants a monopoly in space,” argued a person familiar with Blue Origin’s Washington strategy.
All of which means that Monday’s launch may have more at stake than six women and their pre-flight beauty regimens.
• This article was amended on 14 April 2025 to correct the year in which William Shatner travelled into space aboard the Blue Origin rocket; it was in 2021, not 2022.
