Arlington entrepreneur prepares for Blue Origin space flight

Arlington entrepreneur and former NASA engineer Aisha Bowe will be a member of the first all-woman crew set to fly to the edge of space next week as passengers on a commercial rocket.

Along with singer Katy Perry and CBS Mornings co-host Gayle King, Bowe is scheduled to take an 11-minute flight April 14 on the self-flying New Shepard rocket from Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin aerospace company. The rest of the group includes Lauren Sánchez, an Emmy-winning journalist, helicopter pilot and Bezos’ fiancée; documentary producer Kerianne Flynn; and Amanda Nguyễn, a bioastronautics research scientist and advocate for sexual violence survivors.

Bowe is CEO of STEMBoard, which she founded in 2013 in Arlington County and offers advisory services to federal agencies. The company landed on the Inc. 5000 list of the fastest-growing privately owned U.S. companies in 2020, and in 2022, Bowe launched Lingo, a self-paced coding kit that includes tutorials and online resources and is used by children around the world to learn how to code. Lingo recently secured $2.3 million in venture capital.

In February, Bowe was announced as one of the crew members on Blue Origin’s 11th human space flight and New Shepard’s 31st overall mission. She’ll be the first Bahamian American to fly into space, and only five Black women have ever gone to space as NASA astronauts.

Speaking to Elle magazine, which featured the six women on its cover in April, Bowe said: “I read a stat that there’s a huge majority of middle school girls who decide not to pursue STEM fields, although they otherwise would have been interested, because they see them as male-dominated fields. So this representation really matters. It’s people seeing themselves and being able to show up authentically in their careers in the future.”

Bowe, a University of Michigan graduate who was an aerospace engineer at NASA before starting STEMBoard, told Elle that she “wanted to go to space, but I didn’t think it was possible. I was afraid to even dream about it.”

The flight has gotten some criticism along with accolades, as The New York Times columnist Jessica Grose pointed out an “embarrassing exchange” between Sánchez and Perry in the Elle story about getting “glam” for the flight and not drawing attention to serious issues, such as the fact that the Trump administration has laid off 23 people from NASA, including its chief scientist, Katherine Calvin.

On Friday, The Washington Post reported that an early White House budget plan calls for “massive” cuts to NASA’s science budget. Blue Origin secured a $2.38 billion U.S. Space Force contract in April for seven missions, Reuters reported last week.

Meanwhile, Bowe has completed training for the flight, and in an interview with King earlier this week on CBS, she said, “I’ve been preparing for this moment all my life.”

New Shepard, named for late NASA astronaut Alan Shepard, is scheduled to lift off Monday, April 14, at 9:30 a.m. from Blue Origin’s facility in West Texas. It will fly to the edge of space and back, and the flight will be livestreamed on Space.com and Blue Origin’s website. Weather or equipment delays could push liftoff up to an hour later, according to Space.com.