Gayle King reveals what Oprah Winfrey told her when she returned from Blue Origin space flight

King says she took comfort in her friend’s assurance that she’d be okay, because “Oprah knows things.”

Oprah Winfrey and Gayle King photographed in 2023.Credit: Emma McIntyre/Getty

Oprah Winfrey was in tears watching her longtime friend Gayle King launch into space as part of a recent all-female Blue Origin expedition. But it wasn’t because she feared for King’s safety.

“When people saw her crying, people said, ‘Oh, she’s so worried. She thinks something’s gonna happen,” the CBS Mornings cohost, 70, recently told E! News. But “that wasn’t it at all,” King explained.

“She was crying because she knew what it took for me to do that, and so when I came [back] she was saying, ‘I’m so proud of you. You did that, and I’m so proud of you,'” she continued, remembering, “She was so welled up.”

Blue Origin, an aerospace company founded in 2000 by Jeff Bezos, has now completed 11 crewed flights that have crossed the Kármán line, conventionally regarded as the border between Earth’s atmosphere and outer space. King’s flight also included Katy Perry and Bezos’ fiancée, Lauren Sánchez. Past flights have included celebrities like Michael Strahan and William Shatner.

While the only crashes on record for Blue Origin occurred with uncrewed flights, fans voiced their concern for King, Perry, and the rest of the crew’s safety ahead of the April 14 flight.

But King was able to rest easy, because Winfrey was able to rest easy. “She always said I was gonna be okay,” the broadcaster noted, adding, “and Oprah knows things.”

The all-female Blue Origin expedition courted a good deal of controversy, to the surprise of its participants.

Celebrities from Olivia Wilde to Jessica Chastain criticized the expedition for a number of reasons, from the exorbitant cost to the apparent referendum on contemporary feminism that it provoked.

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The all-female Blue Origin 2025 space expedition included Jeff Bezos’ fiancée Lauren Sanchez, popstar Katy Perry, former NASA rocket scientist Aisha Bowe, film producer Kerianne Flynn, journalist Gayle King, and bioastronautics researcher Amanda Nguyen.Blue Origin/UPI/Shutterstock

“Billion dollars bought some good memes I guess,” Wilde wrote on her Instagram Story the day of the launch.

Olivia Munn elaborated further on her distaste for the expedition, saying during an appearance on TODAY With Jenna & Friends, “I know this is probably not the cool thing to say, but there are so many other things that are so important in the world right now… What are you guys gonna do up in space? What are you doing up there?”

Chastain shared an opinion piece published in The Guardian to her X account on April 17 bearing the headline, “The Blue Origin flight showcased the utter defeat of American feminism.”

King defended the expedition, saying that Blue Origin’s goal is not rooted in vanity or wastefulness, but “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.”