(NEXSTAR) – Blue Origin successfully launched six women over the Kármán line on Monday morning, marking the first all-female spaceflight since Soviet-era cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova flew into space on a solo mission in 1963.
The astronauts — recording artist Katy Perry, journalists Gayle King and Lauren Sánchez, former NASA scientist Aisha Bowe, civil rights activist Amanda Nguyen and movie producer Kerianne Flynn — experienced several minutes of weightlessness during the trip, which touched down about 11 minutes after launch from West Texas.
How far up did they travel?
Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket propelled the women almost 66 miles into the atmosphere, according to Blue Origin. That means they soared well over the Kármán line, a boundary located 100 kilometers (about 62 miles) above the Earth.
The Kármán line is recognized as the boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and space by the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale, a Swiss-based governing body and record-keeping organization. For years, Blue Origin has also maintained that the Kármán Line is the threshold that separates Earth’s atmosphere from space.
In 2021, Blue Origin made this opinion known when Virgin Group founder Richard Branson successfully rocketed to an altitude of approximately 282,000 feet, or over 53 miles, on a Virgin Galactic space plane called the VSS Unity. At the time, Blue Origin further suggested that Branson and his fellow astronauts would need “asterisks” next to their names.
“From the beginning, New Shepard was designed to fly above the Kármán line so none of our astronauts have an asterisk next to their name,” the company wrote on X (then Twitter). “For 96% of the world’s population, space begins 100 km up at the internationally recognized Kármán line.”
Where does space actually begin?
The boundary between Earth and “space,” meanwhile, is not clearly defined. Astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell has proposed the boundary should be lower, at around 80 kilometers up, arguing that satellites can survive certain elliptical orbits that dip to this height. But NASA heliophysicist Doug Rowland said it’s tough to demarcate where “space” begins, because Earth’s atmosphere doesn’t necessarily stop at any single point, but instead “just gets less and less dense the higher you go.”
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) further pointed out that a spacecraft would have to travel 600 miles above Earth to escape the planet’s atmosphere completely — meaning that the International Space Station (orbiting between 205 and 270 miles up) wouldn’t even be considered as being in proper “space,” either.
“When you go to where the Space Station is — only a couple hundred miles above the Earth — there’s still enough air there to slow the Space Station down. And if you didn’t re-boost it with rockets, it would come back to Earth based on the air drag,” Rowland said.
‘Never be the same’
Terminology aside, Blue Origin and its newest astronauts certainly consider their trip to space (however it’s defined) a success.
“I will never be the same,” crew member and aerospace engineer Aisha Bowe said after landing.
“I never really thought I could go to space — although I really wanted to go — and today just confirmed that dreams are real,” she added.