Kathmandu. Pop star Katy Perry will be the biggest name in a group of all-female crews to reach the edge of space on billionaire Jeff Bezos’ rocket. The “Fireworks” and “California Girls” singer will be flown more than 100 kilometers (60 miles) above Earth’s surface aboard a plane owned by the Amazon founder’s space company Blue Origin.
Bezos’ fiancée Lauren Sanchez and five other women will take part in the flight, which is scheduled to launch from West Texas at around 8:30 a.m. (1330 GMT). Their fully automated craft will lift off vertically. The crew capsule will then separate mid-flight and then return to Earth via parachutes and retrorockets. Monday’s mission is the first all-female spaceflight since Valentina Tereshkova’s historic solo flight in 1963.
It is also the 11th suborbital crewed mission for Blue Origin, which has been offering space tourism experiences for years. The company does not publicly disclose the cost of the trip, made possible by its New Shepard rocket. The roughly 10-minute flight will take passengers beyond the internationally recognized boundary of space—the Karman Line. There will be a brief period when the women will be able to unbuckle their seatbelts and float in zero gravity.
Perry recently told Elle magazine that she is participating “for my daughter Daisy.” Perry is participating in the event to “inspire her to have no limits on her dreams.”
“I’m so excited to see the inspiration in her eyes and the light in her eyes when she sees that rocket go off and she goes back to school the next day and says, ‘Mommy went to space,’” Perry said in a separate video posted to Instagram. She said the capsule she traveled in during her space training was named ‘Turtle’ and decorated with a ‘feather’ design. Both names are nicknames her parents gave her.
“There’s no coincidence and I’m so grateful for these affirmations, and I feel like something bigger than me is guiding the ship,” Perry said in the video.
Perry, who came to international prominence with her 2008 hit “I Kissed a Girl,” will be joined by TV presenter Gayle King, filmmaker Kerryann Flynn, former NASA scientist Aisha Bowe and Amanda Nguyen, founder of the campaign group Against Sexual Violence. They will follow 52 previous Blue Origin passengers, including longtime “Star Trek” star William Shatner. Such high-profile guests are intended to keep public interest in the work of Blue Origin, which is battling several rival firms in the space tourism space. Bezos’ main rival in passenger flights is Virgin Galactic.
It offers a similar suborbital experience. But Blue Origin aims to take space tourists to orbit in the future, to compete directly with Elon Musk’s SpaceX. In January, Blue Origin’s much more powerful New Glenn rocket successfully completed its first unmanned orbital mission.
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