Blue Origin has revealed the crew for its next New Shepard suborbital mission, NS-31, marking a historic moment in spaceflight. The six-member team, scheduled to launch this spring, will be the first all-female space crew since Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova’s solo flight in 1963.
Blue Origin's New Shepard lifts off during the NS-28 suborbital human spaceflight. Credit: Blue Origin
Among the high-profile passengers are CBS journalist Gayle King, global pop icon Katy Perry, and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos’s fiancée, Lauren Sánchez, who reportedly played a key role in organizing the mission. They will be joined by aerospace engineer Aisha Bowe, film producer Kerianne Flynn, and bioastronautics researcher and activist Amanda Nguyen.
A Historic Flight for Women in Space
While many women have traveled to space in the decades since Tereshkova’s mission, they have always done so as part of mixed-gender crews. Blue Origin is celebrating NS-31 as a milestone in female spaceflight history, bringing together women from diverse backgrounds.
Aisha Bowe is an aerospace engineer and former NASA researcher who advocates for STEM education. She is the CEO of STEMBoard and the founder of LINGO, an organization focused on making technology education more accessible.
Kerianne Flynn, originally from the fashion and human resources industries, has dedicated her recent career to filmmaking, producing two movies highlighting women’s stories: This Changes
Everything (2018) and LILLY (2024), a biopic about equal-pay activist Lilly Ledbetter.
All female Crew members of NS-31 sub-orbital mission
Amanda Nguyen, a bioastronautics researcher and former NASA intern, is a dedicated advocate for survivors of sexual violence through her nonprofit Rise. A survivor herself, she was named one of TIME’s Women of the Year in 2022. Nguyen will also become the first Vietnamese woman in space, following Phạm Tuân, who flew aboard a Soviet mission in 1980.
NS-31 will mark the 31st flight of Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket and the 11th mission carrying passengers. The reusable rocket system launches from a site in West Texas, propelling a capsule with up to six passengers beyond the von Kármán line, the internationally recognized boundary of space at 100 kilometers (62 miles) above Earth.
Once the rocket reaches its peak altitude, the booster and capsule separate. The booster returns for a controlled vertical landing, while the capsule, carrying the passengers, parachutes back to the desert floor. The entire journey lasts about 10 minutes, offering a few moments of weightlessness and a breathtaking view of Earth from space.
Because the passengers cross the von Kármán line, they are officially recognized as astronauts, even though they do not enter orbit. This classification aligns with historical precedent—early U.S. astronauts Alan Shepard (for whom the rocket is named) and Gus Grissom also did not orbit the Earth during their suborbital Mercury missions in 1961.
Blue Origin’s announcement of NS-31 comes just two days after the successful NS-30 mission, which also carried six passengers. However, one individual opted to remain publicly unidentified, despite appearing in photos and being labeled “R. Wilson” on his flight suit and the mission patch.
The other NS-30 passengers included:
Jesús Calleja, a Spanish TV host
Dr. Richard Scott, a physician
Tushar Shah, co-head of research at a hedge fund
Elaine Chia Hyde, an entrepreneur and the only woman on the flight
Lane Bess, a cybersecurity executive making his second New Shepard trip
Blue Origin continues to expand its presence in space tourism while also preparing for more ambitious orbital missions. Last month, the company successfully launched its first New Glenn rocket, named after astronaut John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth in 1962.
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