For former NASA rocket scientist Aisha Bowe, being one of the six women on Blue Origin’s first all-female flight crew was an accomplishment bigger than herself.

In an exclusive conversation with PEOPLE, Bowe opens up about how her late father, who died in January, reacted to the news that she would be joining bioastronautics research scientist Amanda Nguyen, film producer Kerianne Flynn, journalist Gayle King, philanthropist Lauren Sánchez and musician Katy Perry on the Monday, April 14 mission to the edge of space.

“Before he left the Earth, I have a beautiful text message from him that says when he found out that I was flying, that all the people before him and all the people after me are proud of me,” says Bowe, who admits she wishes her father, who wanted to be an astronaut, would have seen her take flight.

While in orbit, Bowe held up a Bahamas patch, a tribute to her family. She explains it was a “powerful” way to “connect the past, the present, and the future space.”

“I nodded to this mission and the suborbital flight, which we all know Alan Shepard (the first American in space), but very few people know that New Shepard (Blue Origin’s rocket), which was modeled after Alan Shepard’s flight, is on the same path that eventually ended up in the Bahamas,” she says.

“While we are here in West Texas, my 92-year-old grandfather, who was born in Exuma, Bahamas, which is my call sign today, Exuma, got an opportunity to see his granddaughter fly to space,” adds Bowe, who feels that it makes the mission something that was “supposed” to happen.

Like Bowe, Nguyen was running through many emotions that began long before takeoff.

“I woke up at 1 a.m. I hadn’t been nervous this entire time and then at 1 a.m., my heart was pounding and I had to run through the experiments. I have three experiments that I did,” she tells PEOPLE.

Two of the experiments the bioastronautics research scientist did were in the capsule and because “time is so precious up there” Nguyen said it was something she had to “really nail.”

“And then I had to give a speech to Vietnam and I had all these other things and I was like I need to be able to have a cheat sheet,” she says, noting that she was giving an armband where she could write everything down.

While getting her job done was at the top of her to-do list, after the flight, she was left with a feeling of gratitude.

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“I’m both so grateful that I was able to do that science part, push that research forward and then also be able to honor my community and also my former self,” she says.