This article was featured in One Great Story, New York’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly.
While Katy Perry was floating upside down in space, cooing “Oh my goddess!” at the moon, Amanda Nguyen had a job to do. The Blue Origin capsule carrying Lauren Sánchez and the five women chosen to join her on a trip across the Kármán line had just reached zero gravity, and Nguyen had less than a minute to execute two experiments. She took Petri dishes out of a small pouch in her seat, which immediately flew in opposite directions, adding precious seconds to her timeline. While Nguyen decided which one to prioritize, Perry released the set list for her upcoming tour in front of a camera capturing video of their flight. One by one, the other women aboard — CBS anchor Gayle King, film producer Kerianne Flynn, and Aisha Bowe, an entrepreneur and former NASA engineer — displayed their own zero-G indicators, objects astronauts float to show they’ve reached microgravity.
Nguyen, an activist and bioastronautics researcher, planned to release the hospital bracelet from the night she was raped in college and a note she wrote herself back in her dorm room to never give up on her dreams of becoming an astronaut. But first, she took a moment to stare out the capsule window in awe and record a nine-second message for the people of Vietnam with the GoPro strapped to her head. By the time she was done, mission control told the crew to buckle up for the ride back to Earth. Strapped into her seat, Perry sang a few lines of “What a Wonderful World”; Nguyen didn’t even notice. She was focused instead on the techniques she had learned at the International Institute for Astronautical Sciences to withstand the g-forces on descent strong enough to make her bones feel like they were being crushed. King has said she almost passed out. Nguyen remembers thinking, It is actually chill.
The invitation to join Blue Origin’s all-female flight took the 33-year-old by surprise. For the past four years, Nguyen had been training to do research in space with the IIAS and figured a commercial flight was her best option. She made connections at Virgin Galactic and thought she was a shoo-in to fly on one of its rockets, but the company paused suborbital flights in 2023. “I was crying because I had no routes in space,” she tells me when we meet for coffee in New York a week before the launch. She knew nobody at Blue Origin. So when a staffer reached out at the end of 2023, Nguyen had no expectation that the company would invite her to fly, let alone aboard one of its highest-profile launches to date. The nonprofit Space for Humanity would partially foot the bill; Blue Origin doesn’t disclose how much a seat on its rockets costs, but one has been auctioned off for as high as $28 million.
The opportunity would allow Nguyen to do her research and become the first Vietnamese woman in space, a dream that had been derailed when she was raped in her last year studying astrophysics at Harvard. (In the meantime, she kept busy, founding the nonprofit organization Rise, helping Congress pass the Sexual Assault Survivors’ Rights Act, and earning a Nobel Peace Prize nomination.) At first, she had no idea who the other passengers would be, and she didn’t care. When she found out she would be flying alongside a pop star and a famous broadcaster, she thought, Dope. I guess I’ll continue my science.
Nguyen is playfully nerdy when talking about her research, but when I ask how she feels about celebrities who have never even heard of the Kármán line being flown to space, she becomes more guarded. “We live in a capitalist world,” she says. “Ultimately, I’m able to fly because of this public-private partnership that NASA intentionally opened up.” Sure, I say, but as someone who has put in the work, doesn’t it annoy her that space has become a playground for the rich? She pivots to talking about her experiments, so I ask again. “It’s less annoying and more like, ‘That’s the reality,’” she says. “‘I’ve been given these cards. Now what do I do with that?’” Nguyen would rather be flying to the moon on a NASA rocket and doing research alongside her “space sisters,” a group of fellow women astronauts. But as a “pathological optimist,” she has always “climbed cringe mountain” to reach her goals. (Cringe is one of the tamer words critics have used to describe the flight — Emily Ratajkowski said she was “disgusted” by the oligarchical space tourism, while Olivia Munn thought it was “gluttonous.”)
Four days before the flight, Nguyen arrived on the Blue Origin campus in West Texas, a 150-acre expanse of desert that, with its firepits, aluminum trailers, and fried chicken dinners, seems more suited to glamping than rocket-launching. She approached the next two days of training, where the women simulated every part of the mission in mock capsules, with the confidence of the person who did all the work on a group project. “I am the one, by many miles, who asked the most questions,” she says, perched on the couch in her trailer after an 11-hour day. (An astronaut trainer at Blue Origin called her “Hermoine.”) When I ask if she had the highest score in the group on her protocols test, she smiles and says, “I did well.”
It helped that Nguyen interned twice at NASA headquarters and has flown in a jet with a higher gravitational force than a rocket in IIAS boot camp. She also got special permission from Blue Origin to do her experiment on the Petri dishes while floating. While other crew members would wear small biomonitors to measure their heart rates and blood oxygen levels, she planned to test a sample of new spacesuit fabric from NASA (could it absorb a substance like period blood?) and an electric chip (could it detect breast cancer in astronauts exposed to radiation?). Leading up to the flight, she timed every second of the experiments like a highly choreographed dance routine. While King was a public wreck leading up to the launch, Nguyen told me, “I have no space to be nervous.”
She takes the science so seriously that when, five minutes into our call, her research assistant interrupted to say he had just gotten word the crew was waiting for her to join them at dinner, her brow furrowed. “What?” she said. “It’s news to me too,” he said. “Let’s just go.” Though she still had to complete a dry-run of her experiments before waking up at 4:30 a.m. for more training, she changed into a floral blouse and spent the next hour eating scallops and cucumber salad with Sánchez and the other women. During the flight itself, she would have to budget time for a group photo in zero gravity. “We have literal minutes in space,” she tells me after coming back from dinner, twirling her index finger in the universal motion for “Wrap it up.” Minutes later, she catches herself and adds, “That photo will be an important moment to inspire young girls.”
All of the women onboard have echoed this sentiment ad nauseam — “Any type of person can reach their dreams,” Perry told Elle in a glossy pre-launch interview. “We are inspiring the world right now,” Bowe said after the capsule touched down — but listening to Nguyen talk about her experiments in our interviews was more energizing than any of these platitudes. Plus they ring a bit hollow when you’ve been invited to fly on a rocket owned by Jeff Bezos, a man who supports an administration that laid off NASA employees including Katherine Calvin, the agency’s chief scientist, and islooking to slash the agency’s budget nearly in half. As cool as it is to watch a rocket shoot up into the atmosphere, the trip didn’t offer much of a road map for success for young women in STEM beyond becoming, marrying, befriending, or being chosen by a billionaire. (Sánchez, Bezos’s fiancée, has said she was “fired up” about the mission’s critics, given the thousands of Blue Origin employees who “put their heart and soul into this vehicle.”)
“I’m not wealthy, and I’m not a celebrity,” Nguyen is quick to point out. “I’m here to do a job.” She notes that since the late ’60s, people have been criticizing spending on space travel while people suffer on Earth, citing Gil Scott-Heron’s poem “Whitey on the Moon” (“I can’t pay no doctor bills / But whitey’s on the moon”). Nguyen says her research on women’s health in microgravity, like the microchip that detects breast cancer, also applies down on the blue planet. “That technology is going to save lives,” she says. “For me, that is the mission accomplished.”
When I catch up with Nguyen after the flight, she exhales as she sinks into a cushy chair. She hasn’t eaten yet, is still wearing her designer space suit, and needs to pee. While she is clearly moved by the experience — staring down at Earth, she thought, Everything that’s ever lived or died is on this pale blue dot — seven hours of interviews, photo ops, and selfies with family have left little room for her to really process it. “I thought I would be sobbing up there,” she says of the flight. “I’m still in that locked-in mode.” She’s jonesing to dig into the data from her experiments, but that will have to wait. She has dinner with her crewmates and their guests, which include her aunt and the Vietnamese ambassador to the United Nations, to attend. As we wrap up, Nguyen’s research assistant asks if she’ll do one more quick broadcast-news hit. “There’s food here if you want,” he says, glancing at a table with ribs and coleslaw. “You know what I want?” she says. “I want a moment to myself in the desert.”
