First-in-history: Bezos's Blue Origin blasts off all-female crew to space
What's the story
Jeff Bezos's aerospace company Blue Origin launched an all-female crew to space today.
The NS-31 mission which took off at 7:00pm (IST) has six women, including pop star Katy Perry and journalist Gayle King, traveling to the Karman line.
This internationally recognized boundary of space is situated 100km above sea level.
To note, the mission took off aboard Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket.
Space boundary
What is the Karman line?
The Karman line, set by Hungarian physicist Theodore von Karman in the 1900s, is a widely accepted boundary of space.
However, a 2014 study acknowledged that "the atmosphere is indeed dynamic and fluctuates in density which makes any delimitation imprecise," leading to fluctuations of the Karman line between 84km and 100km above sea level.
Passengers
A look at the crew
The New Shepard rocket, which was launched from Launch Site One on Corn Ranch in rural West Texas, is a 59-foot-tall suborbital model that flies without a pilot.
The crew for the mission includes Amanda Nguyen, civil rights activist and first Vietnamese woman to fly to space; film producer Kerianne Flynn; Lauren Sanchez (Bezos's fiance); and entrepreneur Aisha Bowe, a former NASA rocket scientist.
Perry expressed gratitude for being included with this group of women.
Mission timeline
Flight duration and historical context
The spaceflight will last some 11 minutes. The crew capsule will detach from the rocket three minutes from now, hitting its peak four minutes into the flight.
Here, passengers will experience weightlessness for some three minutes before coming back to Earth under parachutes.
Although this mission is termed as the first all-woman crew flight, Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova flew a solo mission in 1963.
Criteria
Who qualifies as an 'astronaut?'
The definition of an 'astronaut' varies from organization to organization.
The US government awards astronaut badges to military and NASA pilots who fly beyond 81km.
Earlier, sommercial space travelers were given astronaut wings by the US Federal Aviation Administration for flights above 81km, before discontinuing this practice.
Elon Musk's SpaceX has awarded silver wings to non-government passengers flying on its Crew Dragon capsule.