(VOVWORLD) - Blue Origin completed its latest spaceflight Monday with a historic all-female crew. The mission, NS-31, was the 11th human flight for Jeff Bezos’s space tourism company and 31st overall.
 The six female crew on the NS-31 spaceflight (Photo: Courtesy Blue Origin Media) |
It included six women: aerospace engineer Aisha Bowe, activist Amanda Nguyen, CBS Mornings host Gayle King, pop singer Katy Perry, film producer Kerianne Flynn, and Lauren Sánchez, an author, TV host turned philanthropist and Bezos’s fiancée.
Vietnamese American Amanda Ngoc Nguyen, a scientist and activist, marked a historic milestone as the first woman of Vietnamese origin to fly into space.
Nguyen, 33, a bioastronautics research scientist and activist, is participating in the mission as part of the Space for Humanity’s Citizen Astronaut Program. The program is designed to empower citizen astronauts to "address global challenges with a broader outlook," according to the organization’s website. Nguyen serves as an Overview Ambassador, using her experience to foster a deeper connection to Earth and promote the vision of making space accessible to all.
The crew boarded their capsule atop the fully autonomous New Shepard rocket in Van Horn, Texas, early Monday for a suborbital flight that lasted just over 10 minutes. The rocket took them past the Kármán line — 62 miles above Earth, which some international aviation and aerospace experts consider the threshold of space — allowing the crew to experience a few minutes of weightlessness before returning safely to Earth in a capsule that employed three parachutes as it touched down on the desert floor.