Blue Origin's celebrity passenger list expands with latest flight

While they didn't get close to any stars, passengers aboard the latest Blue Origin flight included earthly stars like pop singer Katy Perry and TV journalist Gayle King. These celebrities now join a list of those who have made the trip to space and back.

Both Perry and King kneeled and kissed the West Texas ground when they returned Monday from their all-female mission, an 11-minute journey past the Kármán line, which is 62 miles above sea level and considered the boundary between Earth's atmosphere and outer space.

Monday's successful launch, the eleventh Blue Origin sub-orbital human spaceflight mission dating back to 2021, also included former NASA rocket scientist Aisha Bowe; Amanda Nguyen, a bioastronautics research scientist; filmmaker Kerianne Flynn; and Blue Origin owner Jeff Bezos' journalist fiancée, Lauren Sanchez.

"I had to come back. I mean, we're getting married! If I didn't come back, that would be a bummer for me," Sanchez said after the star-studded trip.

Other celebrities who have previously ridden Blue Origin to the point of weightlessness, include:

Bezos, the billionaire founder of Amazon and owner of The Washington Post who started Blue Origin in 2000. The 61-year-old Bezos was aboard the July 20, 2021, maiden flight of Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket, named after NASA astronaut Alan Shepard, who in 1961 became the first American to travel in space. Bezos went to space with his half brother, Mark Bezos, and two other space tourists.

Wally Funk, a pioneering female aviator and former military jet test pilot who in the 1960s endured the grueling training astronaut training as part of a privately funded Woman in Space Program that later became known as the "Mercury 13" project due to its 13 women participants. Funk, however, was never allowed the chance to go to space until she joined Bezos on the 2021 Blue Origin maiden flight and became, at age 82, the oldest female to travel into space.

William Shatner, the actor who played space adventurer Capt. James T. Kirk in the TV series "Star Trek," didn't get a real chance to fly into space until Oct. 13, 2021, when at the age of 90 he and three crew members flew on Blue Origin's New Shepard into the final frontier, becoming the oldest man in space. "It was so moving," Shatner said when he touched back down to Earth. "This experience has been something unbelievable."

Michael Strahan, the NFL Hall of Famer and co-anchor of ABC's "Good Morning America," blasted into space aboard New Shepard on Dec. 11, 2021. The former New York Giant's defensive end, Strahan compared the flight to being "almost like an out-of-body experience." Strahan took a few personal items on his journey, including his Super Bowl and Hall of Fame rings, his retired Giants jersey, his grandfather's pocket watch and the shell casings from the gun that was fired at his father's military funeral.

Ed Dwight, the United States' first Black astronaut candidate, flew into space for the first time on May 19, 2024, as Blue Origin launched its New Shepard NS-25 spacecraft, its first human flight since 2022. Dwight, who at age 90, took his first trip to space more than six decades after President John F. Kennedy appointed him in 1961 to the elite Aerospace Research Pilot School -- the Air Force program from which NASA astronauts were chosen. Despite being recommended by the Air Force, Dwight was not chosen for the NASA astronaut corps in the aftermath of Kennedy's assassination. "Long time coming," Dwight said as he emerged from the capsule after landing back on Earth.