Katy Perry leads Blue Origin’s planned all-female crew
Pop star Katy Perry, journalists Gayle King and Jeff Bezos’s fiancee Lauren Sanchez are set to blast off into space on a Blue Origin rocket.
The New Shepard rocket, an 18-metre tall suborbital spacecraft, will carry the first all-female flight crew in more than six decades to the Kármán line, the internationally recognised boundary of space, Bezos-owned Blue Origin said on Friday (Australian time).
Passengers will experience a few minutes of microgravity before returning to earth via parachute-assisted landing in the West Texas desert.
NASA rocket scientist Aisha Bowe, bioastronautics researcher Amanda Nguyen and movie producer Kerianne Flynn will make up the rest of the crew.
“If you had told me that I would be part of the first ever all-female crew in space, I would have believed you,” Perry wrote on Instagram.
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Despite her enthusiasm, she won’t be part of the “first ever all-female crew” – in 1963 Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space with her solo mission.
“Nothing was beyond my imagination as a child. Although we didn’t grow up with much, I never stopped looking at the world with hopeful WONDER! I work hard to live my life that way still, and I am motivated more than ever to be an example for my daughter that women should take up space (pun intended),” Perry wrote.
“That’s why this opportunity is so incredible — so that I can show all of the youngest and most vulnerable among us to reach for the stars, literally and figuratively. I am honoured to be among this diverse group of celestial sisters.”
The company is yet to give a date for the mission.
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“Missions like this can be an effective PR tactic to bring in the private money needed to reduce costs in the long run,” said Professor Ehud Behar, astrophysicist at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology.
“Ultimately, these investments also support the launch of scientific and commercial instruments into space as well – not just people.”
It would be the 11th human flight for the rocket and its 31st overall.
New Shepard’s first crewed flight in July 2021 carried Jeff Bezos and his brother Mark.
The rocket has since taken former NFL player Michael Strahan and Star Trek actor William Shatner, who became the oldest person in space at the age to 90.
The company’s giant New Glenn rocket blasted off from Florida last month on its first mission to space. It was an inaugural step into Earth’s orbit for Bezos’s space company as it aims to rival SpaceX in the satellite launch business.
– with AAP
