Today, at 9:30 am Eastern Standard Time, Blue Origin Space Flight NS-31 will take off from Van Horn, Texas, with an all-female crew that includes Lauren Sánchez, Katy Perry, and Gayle King. Its destination? The Kármán line—or the boundary where Earth’s atmosphere meets outer space.
The launch has attracted immense public interest. Part of it is because of the celebrity presence—Sanchez, Perry, and King are all well-known global figures who posed on the cover of Elle ahead of the launch. (“We are going to put the ‘ass’ in astronaut,” Perry told the magazine.) But part of it is because Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin, along with Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, are pioneers in space tourism, allowing people other than astronauts to journey to the edges of the Earth. Plus, extraterrestrial exploration has captivated American society since the days of the space race: As President John F. Kennedy said in his famous address to Congress in 1961: “Space is open to us now; and our eagerness to share its meaning is not governed by the efforts of others.”