I’ve had the good fortune to have been surrounded by brave and capable women. When our daughter and her husband were dating, he was deployed to Korea. They maintained a long-distance relationship during the time he was overseas. His next assignment was to a base in England, where he served for two years. While she couldn’t join him in Korea, she could in England, and they decided to work it out. Before she left for England, I listened as my mother told our daughter how much she admired her courage. Mother said, “I would never have been so brave.” I didn’t want to interrupt the precious conversation between grandmother and granddaughter, but later, I told my mother that I thought she had been equally brave.

After the attack on Pearl Harbor, my father enlisted in the US Army Air Corps. He entered the service as a 2nd Lieutenant because he was already a pilot with an instructor’s rating. He served his enlistment as a service pilot in several roles, including training new pilots in the transition from single-engine to multi-engine aircraft, flying missions for training bombardiers, and transporting dignitaries. He served his enlistment based in Victorville, California. Before his enlistment, my parents had met at a college play. When my mother was six years younger than our daughter, when our daughter went to England, she traveled alone from Montana to California. She and my father were married in the home of an aunt and uncle. Her parents and sisters could not attend the wedding because of wartime travel restrictions. From my point of view, she was equally brave as our daughter.

After the war, my parents lived in Oklahoma for a while as my father completed his education and earned his airframe and engine mechanics ratings. They then found an airport to establish their business. They started with a single airplane in Big Timber, Montana, when the airport was little more than a rotating beacon in an empty field. They picked rock, mowed runways, and worked to install lighting. My father flew charters, instructed, bought and sold airplanes, and provided fuel and maintenance. Early in their marriage, my mother earned her private pilot’s license before they had children. She was the first to take the pilot’s check ride at the Big Timber airport. I have a newspaper column reporting her accomplishments. She continued to be a full partner in the family business operations for the rest of her life.

After being widowed, she enrolled in the Adult Advanced Space Academy at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center. The Center is located in Huntsville, Alabama, on the U.S. Space and Rocket Museum campus. Its address is 1 Tranquility Base. She spent six days and five nights in the intensive training program, which involved multi-axis training, neutral buoyancy training, engineering training, and more. The program demonstrated a small slice of the training astronauts receive before traveling to space.

My mother didn’t live to see the advent of space tourism, but she would have loved to have the opportunity to go into space. I do not doubt that she would have closely followed and cheered yesterday when the Blue Origin rocket took a short up-and-down trip to the edge of space with an all-female crew. She might not have been familiar with the music of pop star Katy Perry. Still, she would have celebrated the crew that included a television host, the fiancée of Jeff Bezos, a film producer, a former NASA engineer, and a scientist.

While my mother was a pioneer in civil aviation after World War II, she would not have had the chance to travel to space even if she had lived several decades longer. Although the prices of space tourism are not disclosed, and the Blue Origin company would not say how much the mission costs, only those who are very famous or well-connected have been able to travel to space as private citizens. Jared Isaacman, appointed to become NASA administrator pending Senate confirmation, is a billionaire who has traveled to space twice. He was the first private citizen to perform a space walk. His trips were on SpaceX, a company controlled by Elon Musk.

For now, being a billionaire is the leading qualification for private citizens to travel to space. Short of that, you must be famous enough that billionaires know your name. Other famous people traveled to West Texas to witness the launch and return of the space travelers. Oprah Winfrey, Kris Jenner, and other members of the Kardashian family were among the celebrities who attended the event.

Nonetheless, an all-woman crew is a milestone worth celebrating. It is hard to say how space travel will unfold with the development of advanced robotics and other ways of exploring space that don’t involve humans on board spaceships. A lot can be learned without subjecting humans to the rigors of space travel. But there is something in humans that compels us to seek new challenges and explore new places. Plans are being laid for additional human visits to the Moon and a human expedition to Mars.

There is a big difference between Jeff Bezos’s fiancée riding on a rocket controlled by a ground-based engineering team and my mother flying solo in an airplane over which she had complete control. Flight into space requires an extensive team of engineers, and astronauts are, for the most part, passengers. The skilled piloting involved in the first moon landing and the landings of the Space Shuttle are quite different from the computer-controlled trajectories of contemporary rockets. Nonetheless, an all-female crew is a milestone worth noting.

Perhaps it isn’t accurate to say yesterday’s flight was the first with an all-female crew, as Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova launched solo for a three-day mission in 1963. Still, space travel has been chiefly reserved for males. Of the approximately 700 people who have launched from this planet into space and returned, only 15% have been female.

We have a long way to go before women have equal opportunity. Each step on that journey is worth celebrating. I am fortunate to have brave and capable women in my life.