Breaking the Gender Barrier May Be New For Space Tourism, But Not For NASA Missions

Nobody will be giving out any medals when Blue Origin’s eleventh crewed space flight leaves the ground. The brief suborbital sojourn has a planned April 14 liftoff time of 8:30 a.m. CDT and will land just 11 minutes later. There will not likely be the kind of global audience and saturation coverage that has attended other crewed space launches.

That’s not the way it was on May 5, 1961, when NASA astronaut Alan Shepard flew a similar flight profile—a popgun trajectory above the atmosphere...