Early in 2024, Jeff Bezos’ private space company Blue Origin will launch his girlfriend Lauren Sanchez and a female crew into space.
Although the business has not yet revealed the identity of the five ladies joining Sanchez, it will be the first all-female crew to travel in space.
Sánchez, 53, will continue the space boot legacy of her millionaire boyfriend.
Bezos, 59, travelled to space on the first voyage of Blue Origin’s New Shepard launch vehicle on July 20, 2021, together with his brother Mark Bezos, 56, pioneering female aviator Wally Funk, 83, and physics student Oliver Daemen, 20.
Sánchez is super enthusiastic’ and a bit nervous about leaving Earth and travelling to space, which is understandable.
She told the Wall Street Journal Magazine that the winners will be “women who are making a difference in the world, who are significant, and who have a message to deliver.”
Similar to NASA’s plans, which call for sending the first female astronauts to the moon in 2025 as part of its Artemis mission, Sánchez’s plans call for sending a crew made up entirely of women into space.
Two years before fellow billionaire Elon Musk started SpaceX in 2000, the founder and former CEO of Amazon ventured into the space industry.
Bezos is reported as “extremely encouraging” of his girlfriend’s space dreams and “thrilled” that they are coming true.
She remarked, “I’m going to have to keep him from going on this flight as much as he wants to.”
He’ll be rooting for us all from the sidelines, I’m sure.
The former news anchor has achieved great success on her own. She founded Black Ops Aviation, a female-owned aerial film and production firm, and she holds a licence for flying a chopper.
The mother of three claimed that her partner, who she has been dating since Bezos’s divorce from MacKenzie Scott in 2019, “inspires” her.
She told WSJ Magazine, “He’s the kindest human I know; he makes me a better person every day; he’s so joyful.”
Bezos wants to usher in a new era of commercial space flight, one in which regular people like you and I will be able to observe Earth from orbit.
Customers of Blue Origin must currently pay several million dollars to obtain that experience, though.
The crew members can experience a few minutes of weightlessness during the suborbital Blue Origin shuttle trips, which last around 10 minutes and take them 60 miles above the Earth’s surface. They will eventually return to Earth in a parachute-controlled landing.
The sixth voyage by Blue Origin overall took place in August 2022, making it the most current crewed space mission.
It launched Sara Sabry, an engineer, and Mario Ferrari, an entrepreneur, into space as the first citizens of Egypt and Portugal, respectively.