Private spaceflight company Blue Origin is scheduled to launch an all-female crew on a suborbital flight Monday at 9:30 a.m. ET.
Among the six-person crew are journalist Gayle King, singer Katy Perry and Lauren Sanchez – a pilot, journalist and vice chair of the Bezos Earth Fund who is also engaged to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
Sanchez picked the women who will join her on the 10-minute spaceflight from West Texas aboard a New Shepard rocket.
Perry, Sanchez and King will be joined by Aisha Bowe, a former NASA rocket scientist who now heads an engineering firm, research scientist Amanda Nguyen and movie producer Kerianne Flynn.
Blue Origin announced the crew in February.
Blue Origin has flown tourists on short hops to space since 2021, after Bezos climbed aboard with his brother for the inaugural trip; the trip will be the company’s 11th human spaceflight. Some passengers have received free rides, while others have paid a hefty sum to experience weightlessness. The company declined to comment on who is footing the bill for Monday’s flight.
The news of the upcoming trip has not been without critiques, most recently from actor Olivia Munn, who bemoaned the mission’s cost and publicity. But Perry said she believes an all-women crew — the first since Valentina Tereshkova’s solo spaceflight in 1963 — has historic ramifications. Only 14% of people who have gone to space so far have been women.
