On Monday morning, a group of women went where most have never gone before: space.
The pop star, along with CBS Mornings co-host Gayle King, former news anchor and fiancee to Jeff Bezos Lauren Sánchez, former NASA rocket scientist Aisha Bowe, bioastronautics research scientist Amanda Nguyen, and movie producer Kerianne Flynn, traveled to the edge of space on a vessel developed by Bezos’ private spaceflight company, Blue Origin, NBC News reported.
Here’s everything about their history-making flight and why the achievement means so much to Bowe and her family.
Katy Perry described the trip as second only to becoming a mother
Perry and the rest of her all-female flight crew, the first of its kind since 1963, took off on Monday at 9:30 a.m. ET from Blue Origin’s launch site in Van Horn, Texas. The New Shepard rocket was used in the flight and accelerated to more than three times the speed of sound. Named after Alan Shepard, the first American in space, the vessel is designed to operate in suborbital space without a pilot present.
The trip was planned to last around 10 minutes and took its passengers just above an invisible demarcation of the edge of space known as the Kármán line, which sits at an altitude of 62 miles. After reaching the line, the passengers experienced moments of weightlessness before returning to the Texas desert via parachutes.
“I feel super connected to love,” Perry said after safely returning to Earth, adding that the experience was only second to becoming a mother, The Guardian reported.
Bowe’s experience on the voyage reminded her of the collectiveness of life on Earth.
“There’s no boundaries, there’s no borders, there’s just Earth,” she said of being on the edge of space.
She recounted the moment they “got up there and out of our seats, we all just looked at each other.”
“There was this moment – and I can’t wait for everyone to see it on the video – between all of us and it’s just beautiful, so beautiful,” she said.
Aisha Bowe honored her late father by carrying his star on the voyage
Ahead of venturing beyond Earth’s atmosphere, Bowe told Elle she’d been preparing for the opportunity to go to space her whole career, but she never thought it would happen.
“I was afraid to do it,” she told the outlet. “I was afraid to even dream about it. And I started to say to myself, You know what, Aisha? Why are you afraid of the one thing that you’ve waited your entire life to do? Just go do it. And so when I got the call, I realized that it wasn’t “No” back then—it was “Not right now,” and now is the time.”
Bowe also opened up about becoming the first person of Bahamian heritage to fly into space and how excited she was to share the achievement with her grandfather. After the flight, Bowe said the 92-year-old was nervous watching her voyage and “Oprah squeezed him” for comfort.
In addition to her grandfather, Bowe planned to share the achievement with another family member. She told Elle that she shared the dream with her late father, who recently passed, and “came from The Bahamas to study in the United States because he wanted to work for NASA.”
“When my dad found out that I was flying with Blue Origin, he sent me a text message and he said, ‘I’m so proud of you.’ He said, ‘All the people who came before me are proud of you, and all the people who come after me are proud of you. And I’m honored to be able to say in this moment that you’re making history,'” she told the outlet, adding she would carry his star on her voyage.
Following her return, The Guardian reported she offered advice to children watching, “Dream it, plan it and go and do it. I never really thought I could go to space … but today just confirmed dreams are real and sometimes reality is wrong.”
