Pop star Katy Perry and journalists Gayle King and Lauren Sanchez, who can also be billionaire Jeff Bezos’s fiancée, are set to blast off into area on a Blue Origin rocket, marking the primary all-female flight crew in additional than six a long time.
The New Shepard rocket, an 18-metre suborbital spacecraft, will carry the crew to the Kármán line, the internationally acknowledged boundary of area, Bezos-owned Blue Origin stated in an announcement.
Passengers will expertise a couple of minutes of microgravity earlier than returning to Earth through parachute-assisted touchdown within the West Texas desert.
NASA rocket scientist Aisha Bowe, bioastronautics researcher Amanda Nguyen and film producer Kerianne Flynn will make up the remainder of the crew.
The corporate has not disclosed a date for the mission.
That is the eleventh human flight for the rocket and its thirty first total.
The final recorded all-female spaceflight was the 1963 solo mission of Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, the primary lady in area.
New Shepard’s first crewed flight in July 2021 carried Jeff Bezos and his brother Mark. The rocket has since taken former NFL participant Michael Strahan and Star Trek actor William Shatner, who turned the oldest individual in area on the age to 90.
The corporate’s large New Glenn rocket blasted off from Florida final month on its first mission to area, an inaugural step into Earth’s orbit for Bezos’s area firm because it goals to rival SpaceX, owned by Elon Musk, within the satellite tv for pc launch enterprise.
Blue Origin, SpaceX and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic have come beneath criticism for the environmental impact of their journeys into area because the rising “area tourism” business grows.
The leisure area flights have been referred to as out by some as hypocritical and a gross display of wealth from businessmen who’ve publicly portrayed themselves as allies within the struggle towards local weather change.
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