On 14 April 2025, six women, including singer Katy Perry, successfully completed a short space tourism flight aboard Blue Origin’s New Shepard NS-31 spacecraft. The rocket launched from western Texas around 7 PM IST, reaching over 100 kilometers above Earth, past the Karman line—the boundary of space. The fully automated flight lasted about 10 minutes, with the crew capsule safely parachuting back to the Texas desert.
This was the first all-women tourist spaceflight since Valentina Tereshkova’s solo mission in 1963. The crew included Gayle King, Kerianne Flynn, Aisha Bowe, Amanda Nguyen, and Lauren Sánchez. New Shepard, developed by Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin, is a reusable sub-orbital vehicle named after astronaut Alan Shepard.