All-female celeb crew fly to space for 10 mins on Blue Origin rocket

Broadcast journalist Gayle King and singer Katy Perry made a brief trip into space Monday on a flight operated by Jeff Bezos' private company, Blue Origin. It was the first time an all-female crew had been to space since 1963. Their flight, on Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket, lasted 10 minutes and 21 seconds and took off from Blue Origin's Launch Site One in West Texas at 8.30am local time.

After the flight, King exited the crew capsule and said, "I would just like to have a moment with the ground," before kneeling. King said that Perry sang "What a Wonderful World" during the flight. "It's not about singing my songs, it's about a collective energy in there," Perry said after they returned to Earth. It was the 11th human flight for the New Shepard programme, which had previously flown 52 people, including repeat astronauts, above the Karman line, the internationally recognised boundary of space about 100km above Earth.

Flights on the New Shepard rocket, which provide for a few minutes of weightlessness, do not have a pilot. Family members and friends of the flight's passengers gathered in Texas to watch the launch, including Oprah Winfrey, King's close friend. Kris Jenner, the matriarch of the Kardashian family, and her daughter, Khloe Kardashian, were also in the crowd. Bezos' fiancee, Lauren Sanchez, a former broadcast journalist, was also on board the flight, called the NS-31 mission. The couple's wedding is reportedly set for this summer in Venice. The others were Aisha Bowe, a former rocket scientist at Nasa; Kerianne Flynn, a film producer; and Amanda Nguyen, a bioastronautics research scientist and prominent advocate for sexual assault survivors. Nguyen was first Vietnamese woman to go to space.

But some critics have chafed at the suggestion that the all-female crew represented a moment of feminist progress. The New Shepard programme, the centerpiece of Blue Origin's space tourism business, is an avenue for the wealthy, powerful and well-connected to go to space. Olivia Munn, an actress, called the trip "a bit gluttonous" this month. "What are you guys going to do up in space?"