An All-Female Flight To Space Is Launching Next Week, And Katy Perry Will Be On Board
In one week, an all-female flight will be blasting off into space. The group will contain six women, including CBS host Gayle King and pop star Katy Perry.
They will be the latest humans to travel to space, courtesy of Blue Origin, a space technology company founded by Jeff Bezos.
Bezos started Blue Origin in 2000. Since it began crewed launches in 2021, celebrities and other paying customers have been able to enjoy rides to space.
The upcoming launch is scheduled for Monday, April 14, in West Texas. It will be the company’s 11th human flight and 31st flight overall.
The launch will also be a historic one as it will be the first all-woman flight since 1963, when the Soviet Union’s Valentina Tereshkova made a solo spaceflight.
The group of six women is part of a commercial spaceflight mission known as NS-31. The entire trip is expected to last 11 minutes.
They will be aboard the New Shepard, which is made up of a rocket and a passenger capsule. It will fly itself without any pilots on board, allowing the crew to enjoy the flight as passengers. The New Shepard is designed to be fully reusable. Its capsule returns to Earth via three parachutes.
Meanwhile, the rocket is powered by a BE-3PM engine, which propels it to suborbit before slowing down the booster to six miles per hour for a controlled landing.
Here are the women who will be part of the spaceflight: Aisha Bowe, a former NASA rocket scientist; Amanda Nguyen, a civil rights activist and bioastronautics research scientist; Gayle King, a journalist, television personality, and co-host of CBS Mornings; Katy Perry, a pop music artist; Kerianne Flynn, a film producer; and Lauren Sánchez, an Emmy Award-winning journalist and fiancée of Bezos.
Sign up for Chip Chick’s newsletter and get stories like this delivered to your inbox.
The female crew will have their makeup and hair done for the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, according to an interview for the cover of Elle magazine.
They will be among the most diverse set of women ever to journey to space. Based on the statistics of women in space exploration, the representation is sorely needed.
Women only make up 11 percent of those who have ventured into space. And, of course, the figures are even lower when it comes to women of color.
Only two Latina women, five Black women, and four women of Asian descent have ever gotten to go to space as NASA astronauts. Even then, they had to deal with a lot of gender discrimination on their way up.
The history-making liftoff will take place at Launch Site One, just like all the other Blue Origin launches. The site is located at a private ranch in rural West Texas. Blue Origin will provide a live stream of the launch.
You can read more information here.
More About:News