Lauren Sanchez says she was crying and holding Jeff Bezos' mother during Blue Origin's first manned spaceflight
- Lauren Sanchez said she was crying and holding Jeff Bezos' mom during Blue Origin's first manned spaceflight.
- Bezos was on the Blue Origin's spaceflight, which took place in 2021.
In 2021, Blue Origin completed its first manned spaceflight. Jeff Bezos was onboard the flight, making for an emotional viewing for his fiancée, Lauren Sanchez.
"They were cracking jokes in the capsule, while I'm literally crying, holding his mother," Sanchez told Vogue's Chloe Malle about the launch. Vogue ran a profile story about Sanchez on Monday.
Sanchez and Bezos announced their engagement in May. Their relationship first entered the public eye after the National Enquirer reported on their extramarital affair amid Bezos' divorce from MacKenzie Scott in 2019.
Accompanying Bezos on his 2021 flight were his brother Mark; Oliver Daemen, a Dutch teenager and Blue Origin's first ever paying customer; and Wally Funk, an aviator who was previously denied the chance to go into space in the 1960s because of her gender.
Bezos told Vogue that seeing his entire family come out to wish him and his brother goodbye before the rocket launch was a profound moment.
"You get to see how loved you are by so many people," Bezos said.
Before the launch, Sanchez commissioned silver feather necklaces for the crew, per Vogue. They were engraved with Blue Origin's motto "Gradatim Ferociter" — "step by step, ferociously." The necklaces also came with custom baseball caps with the phrase "Love you to space and back" — Sanchez and Bezos' favorite phrase — embroidered in her handwriting.
Passengers on the Blue Origin flight experienced around three minutes of weightlessness after their rocket crossed the Kármán line, the boundary 62 miles above sea level that some experts say is the point where space begins.
In January, Sanchez told The Wall Street Journal she was planning on heading into space on a Blue Origin rocket alongside a crew of five other women by early 2024.