'I'm a Cardboard Cutout': What Aisha Bowe & Amanda Nguyen Said After Blue Origin's All-Female Crew Returned From Space Tour

Washington DC: Blue Origin made history on Monday with the successful completion of its 11th human spaceflight, this time featuring an all-women crew on a brief journey in space.

The fully automated New Shepard rocket launched at around 8:30 am local time from West Texas, carrying six women, including pop icon Katy Perry, television personality Gayle King, and Lauren Sánchez, the fiancée of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. The sub-orbital flight lasted around 10 minutes, taking the passengers more than 100 kilometers above Earth — crossing the Kármán line, the internationally accepted boundary of space — and allowing a few moments of weightlessness before a smooth return.

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This marks Blue Origin’s first all-female spaceflight and the first of its kind globally since Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova’s pioneering solo mission in 1963. Alongside Perry, King, and Sánchez were aerospace engineer and former NASA rocket scientist Aisha Bowe, civil rights activist and bioastronautics researcher Amanda Nguyen, and film producer Kerianne Flynn.

Reflecting on the experience, Aisha Bowe shared how deeply moved she was by the response her journey sparked among young girls:

"I'm the very same person that I think we're hoping to inspire, and my inbox is going wild. When I landed, I had 637 text messages. I was in 75 Instagram stories, and there were little girls who were taking selfies and were like, yes, my middle school watch, my high school watch, there are cardboard cutouts. I'm a cardboard cutout. Now, I thought I wanted to be a bobblehead. No, I want to be a life-size cardboard cutout in a middle school, and kids are standing next to this cutout, and they're like, they're so excited, and they realize that space includes them too, and I think that's really what we're driving home with this crew," Bowe said in an interview with ABC News.

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Fellow crew member Amanda Nguyen described the mission as a powerful moment of personal vindication and healing after a difficult past. Shge said, "Yeah, I felt like today was justice for me. It was healing, and I know that justice comes in different forms for people. My journey started a decade ago as a student at Harvard, MIT, NASA. It was my dream to do this, and unfortunately, like half of the women in STEM, gender-based violence, deterred me from achieving those dreams in the way that I had envisioned, and I felt like today I was able to honor that person who sacrificed that in order to fight for rights. As a survivor, I put aside those astronaut dreams. A lot of activism comes at the personal cost. My personal cost was the stars, but today, that is no longer a cost."

With this mission, Blue Origin not only broke barriers in commercial space travel but also delivered a powerful message about representation, resilience, and reclaiming dreams.