Blue Origin Flight: Why Katy Perry and Co don't qualify as astronauts who went to space

The heart of the criticism lies in the nature of the mission. Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket, while undeniably advanced, follows a suborbital flight path. It climbs to about 62 miles (100 kilometres) above sea level—just beyond the Kármán line, the internationally recognised boundary of space—before falling back to Earth. That short arc gives passengers about three to four minutes of weightlessness, not because they’ve escaped Earth’s gravity, but because they’re in freefall. As Pollack puts it, it’s “more roller coaster than space odyssey.”

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