Katy Perry to join all-woman Blue Origin spaceflight

Pop singer Katy Perry is scheduled to reach the edge of space on Monday as part of an all-woman crew on a Blue Origin rocket managed by Jeff Bezos’s space firm.

Using the New Shepard rocket, Perry and five other women, including Bezos's fiancée Lauren Sanchez, will journey more than 100 kilometers (62 miles) above Earth's surface as part of the sub-orbital mission, which is set to depart from West Texas at around 8:30 a.m. (1330 GMT).

Film producer Kerianne Flynn, TV host Gayle King, aerospace engineer Aisha Bowe, and former NASA scientist Amanda Nguyen are also traveling with Perry and Sanchez.

The completely automated trip is expected to take roughly ten minutes, according to reports. The crew capsule of the New Shepard rocket will separate mid-flight after a vertical launch. After that, parachutes and a retro-thrust system will decelerate the capsule's descent back to Earth for a gentle landing.

The passengers will have the chance to unbuckle and float inside the capsule during the brief period in microgravity, traversing the internationally acknowledged Karman line, which denotes the edge of space.


As the first all-female spaceflight crew since Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova's solo trip in 1963, this mission is noteworthy.