Gayle King Reacts to Blue Origin Flight Criticism & All Those Memes (Exclusive)

The day after Gayle King was part of the historic all-female Blue Origin space flight, she spoke to “Extra’s” Mona Kosar Abdi about the exhilarating experience. 

Gayle, who is a nervous flier, said she was “terrified” before takeoff! 

While conceding she had “great training,” she said the idea of “putting your butt on a rocket” was still nerve-wracking.

As for how she overcame her fears, she noted, “You start looking at the bigger picture here and I’d said in January… I want to be open to new adventures, whether it’s dating, whether it’s a job… I didn’t dream this big. This was not something that I ever even saw coming.” 

She said, “When I watch the video, I’m blown away by it myself that I was up there in seat #5.”

King has seen all the memes and admits her scared face was “not a cute look.”

She shared, “I do wish, you know, looking at those pictures, that I would have smiled a little bit. Normally, it’s not good to be a meme, but I actually think these are kinda funny because you see everybody ahead of me and behind me, they’re smiling, they’re so happy. They can’t wait to get on board, and I’m just thinking, ‘I gotta follow this instruction.' I’m saying my mantra. I want to get in the seat. I want to strap in correctly, and I was just trying to get it right, and I was also afraid.”

Gayle said she wants to put the focus on “what I look like when I came out,” saying, “You can tell that I’m really, you know, exhilarated, is the word. I felt clear exhilaration that we came up and we came down and that’s the Blue Origin team that was working to keep us safe — and they did that.”

She detailed the moment when Katy Perry sang “What a Wonderful World” as the crew was descending back to Earth. 

She said everyone kept asking Katy if she was going to sing while running their pre-flight simulations and recalled, "She goes, 'You know, I just wanna enjoy the moment, Gayle! I just wanna enjoy the moment, and so I don't have any plans to sing.'"

King remarked, “Think about this, we're coming down, the parachutes are deployed. There's three of them, they're beautiful. All of the sudden Katy starts singing 'What a Wonderful World,' and to hear her voice fill up the capsule, nobody joined in... just her voice, we all in that moment said, ‘Oh, my gosh, let’s just listen to this.’ And it was really magical. And Katy said, 'I hadn't sang that song in years, and it just came to me as I'm looking out the window.'"

Gayle also addressed criticism of the mission, explaining why she finds it disrespectful that people are minimizing it.

King didn’t shy away from the topic, saying, “I think it’s good that we can really address it. I really do love it, because I was one of those people before I went on this flight and before I became educated on space. ‘Why are we spending so much money in space when there’s so much to do here on Earth?’… But when I look at what Blue Origin does, what their intention is to figure out a way to harness the waste here and figure out a way to put it in space, to make the planet Earth a better place, and we use space technology all the time. Whether it's your GPS, whether its your satellite, that doesn't just happen. Every time a flight goes up, they get some type of information.

"Two of the astronauts — I still have a hard time calling myself an astronaut — but two of the astronauts on board, one is a rocket scientist, one is an astrophysicist-activist, were actually doing experiments. But every time one of those goes up, you get some information that can be used for something else."

She emphasized, “I wish people would do more due diligence. And then my question is, ‘Have y’all been to space? Have you been in space?’ Go to space or go to Blue Origin and see what they do and how they do and then come back and say, ‘This is a terrible thing.’ Is it expensive? Yes. But one of the things they’re trying to do, if you get enough people who are interested, it doesn’t have to be that expensive.”

Gayle doesn’t like the Blue Origin fight being called “a ride,” noting, “You never see a man, a male astronaut who's going up in space, and they say, 'Oh, he took a ride.' We actually duplicated the route that Alan Shepard did… No one said, 'He took that ride.' It’s always referred to as a flight or a journey, so I feel that’s a little disrespectful to what the mission was and the work that Blue Origin does."

King also shared, "I've had so many girls and women and some guys who are saying, 'Whoa, I saw what you did. I'm thinking maybe I should reconsider, maybe I could do this too.'... It's not just the young girls, we're also encouraging, I mean the boys look at it and see what women and young girls can do."

Gayle is aware that there are haters, but said she’s "not gonna let people steal my joy and steal the joy of what we did or what we accomplished that day."

“I’m just not gonna let it in,” Gayle promised. “I'm not. And these are some of my friends that are just throwing shade!"

In just a few months’ time, Gayle will be a guest at her co-astronaut Lauren Sanchez and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos’ wedding — has she thought about a wedding gift?