A flag that flew to the moon, a cookie from Cookie Monster and the set list for an upcoming music tour are now all space artifacts, having briefly left the planet with pop star Katy Perry, TV morning show host Gayle King and four more women on Monday (April 14).
The newly created space souvenirs and their newly qualified astronaut owners were part of Blue Origin’s 11th human — and first all-female — flight on its New Shepard rocket.
In addition to Perry and King, the NS-31 crew included former NASA aerospace engineer and entrepreneur Aisha Bowe; research scientist and now first Vietnamese woman in space Amanda Nguyen; film producer Kerianne Flynn; and journalist Lauren Sánchez, who is engaged to Blue Origin’s founder, Jeff Bezos.
As on all of Blue Origin’s New Shepard flights, each of the NS-31 crew members were invited to fill a small, blue “personal payload bag” with items that they wanted to fly and have “space-certified,” so long as the contents did not weigh more than 3 pounds (1.4 kilograms) in total.
“They ask that you pack light,” said King in a video she recorded for Oprah Daily, “and it takes on a whole new meaning, as you might imagine, in zero gravity.”
Related: Katy Perry and Gayle King launch to space with 4 others on historic all-female Blue Origin rocket flight
Brighter than the moon (moon, moon)
The NS-31 flight lifted off on Monday at 9:30 a.m. EDT (1330 GMT; 8:30 a.m. CDT local time) from Blue Origin’s West Texas launch site, located near the town of Van Horn. The suborbital flight sent the New Shepard crew above the Kármán line, the 62-mile-high (100-kilometer) internationally recognized border between Earth and space, and the six women experienced about four minutes of weightlessness while seeing the curvature of our planet and blackness of the universe.
About 10 minutes after its launch, the New Shepard capsule touched down under parachutes and on a last-second cushion of air.
“I know it is going to be an important moment for the future of commercial space travel and for humanity in general and women all around,” said Perry in a pre-flight interview with the Associated Press. “I’m honored to be invited and included with this incredible group of women.”
Represented by the illustration of a firework on the NS-31 crew mission patch (a nod to her 2010 hit song by the same name), Perry said she is bringing bracelets that represent the pillars of her Firework Foundation.
“I’m bringing almost 300 of them so that I can bring them back home for the sixth, seventh and eighth graders that are coming to Camp Firework,” said Perry in an interview with Blue Origin. “It’s really for those kids, to inspire them as well, to never put limitations on their dreams.”
Perry is also bringing a “real life daisy” as a reminder that “Earth is very precious.” (Perry’s four-year-old daughter is also named Daisy.) And she is bringing something for her fans.
“I’m also launching a tour on April 23 in Mexico, and I’ll be on tour for the rest of the year,” Perry said. “And I think it would be pretty cool to reveal my set list for that tour from space.”
Related: Blue Origin: Everything you need to know about the private spaceflight company
Together with her five crewmates, Perry also decorated a postcard as part of a program run by Blue Origin’s nonprofit organization, Club For the Future, which has collected and flown hundreds of thousands of postcards — mostly from children with their hand-drawn visions of what the future will look like — which are then stamped post-flight as having been to space and returned to their senders.
“I’m also partnering with Blue Origin and the Club For The Future program and have been traveling around for the last year and a half collecting dreams from kids all around the world,” said Bowe, who is of Bahamian heritage. “So kids in India, Kenya, France and The Bahamas are going to get their postcard from space back. Even the prime minister of The Bahamas wrote a postcard.”
Bowe also carried a small ramekin of dehydrated conch chowder, which, she said, is the national dish of The Bahamas.
In addition, Bowe flew one of the five American flags that the late Charles “Pete” Conrad took with him to the moon on Apollo 12, NASA’s second lunar landing mission, in November 1969. The small stars and stripes nylon banner is on loan from The Museum of Flight in Seattle, Washington, where it has been on display since 2017 as part of an Apollo exhibit.
“I had the honor of meeting Pete’s wife, Nancy, my first day of work at NASA,” said Bowe. “She became a mentor to me and as a powerful symbol of the present, the past and the future of space exploration.”
Brought to you by the numbers 3, 2 and 1
Sesame Street was well represented among the NS-31 mementos. King flew her grandson’s favorite doll, a toy version of the muppet “Tamir” who joined the show in 2020 to discuss feelings about racism.
“He’s a member of Sesame Street, and Lucas said I could bring Tamir with me into space,” King said.
Elmo and Cookie Monster gave Nguyen items to fly after interviewing her at this year’s South by Southwest (SXSW) conference. She has a couple of Polaroid photos of her with the red furry muppet and a chocolate chip cookie from the blue monster.
“I love you, too, Elmo and Cookie Monster! I hope the cookie survives the G-forces,” Nguyen wrote on Instagram.
Nguyen also brought shells from the island where her mother was a refugee and a personal patch designed by a Vietnamese friend whose family were also refugees.
“This is the personal DNA of my flight — from mom’s refugee boat, to dad’s C-130, to the New Shepard space crew capsule,” she wrote. “Came on boats, and now we’re on spaceships.”
In addition to flying something for her grandson, King packed a family photo and a locket holding photos of her son and daughter. The latter was a gift from actress and talk show host Drew Barrymore.
She also flew a charm bracelet that was made for her by the 10-year-old daughter of one of her “CBS Mornings” coworkers.
“‘These are all the planets, and there’s an astronaut,'” King said, describing what she was told about the charms. “And she said, ‘Gayle, that’s you.'”
‘Fly’-ing to space and back
Bowe, Nguyen and Sánchez chose to bring small science kits on the flight. Bowe partnered with Winston-Salem State University’s astrobotany lab to study the response of crop plants to molecular stress. Nguyen launched swatches from a countermeasure biosuit and a wearable ultrasound patch for MIT’s Media Lab. And Sánchez worked with the nonprofit organization Teachers in Space to collect flight data during the launch.
Sánchez also packed “Flynn,” a plush toy bug (rather than her NS-31 crewmate, Kerianne Flynn).
“I wrote a children’s book [“The Fly Who Flew to Space”] about a little dyslexic fly named Flynn who accidentally gets stuck in a rocket and sees the world and comes back a completely different fly,” Sánchez told Elle magazine.
Beyond that and like Perry, the six women decided to keep some of the items they flew private — at least for now.
“I can’t wait to touch down on Earth and share what we we bring back with the world,” said Flynn.
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