Pop star Katy Perry is gearing up to “shoot across the sky” this spring as she will join a six-member, all-female crew on Blue Origin’s next space flight, the company announced Thursday.
As if answering the call of her hit song “E.T.,” Perry will be part of a star-studded team that includes journalist Lauren Sanchez, who is engaged to Blue Origin’s owner Jeff Bezos, and CBS Mornings co-host Gayle King.
Sanchez, a helicopter pilot and former TV journalist, picked the crew who will join her on a spaceflight from West Texas, the rocket company said.
They will blast off sometime this spring aboard a New Shepard rocket, named after Alan Shepard, the first American in space. No launch date was given.
Flights typically last just 10 or 11 minutes from liftoff to landing, with passengers experiencing a few minutes of microgravity as their capsule soars beyond the Karman line – the internationally recognized boundary of space, 100 kilometers (62 miles) above sea level.
The rocket booster makes an upright vertical landing, while the capsule deploys parachutes for a gentle touchdown in the Texas desert.
Blue Origin has flown tourists on short hops to space since 2021. Some passengers have gotten free rides, while others have paid a hefty sum to experience weightlessness. It was not immediately known who was footing the bill for this upcoming flight.
Sanchez invited singer Perry and TV journalist King, as well as a former NASA rocket scientist who now heads an engineering firm, Aisha Bowe, research scientist Amanda Nguyen, and movie producer Kerianne Flynn.
This will be Blue Origin’s 11th human spaceflight. It will mark the first all-female spaceflight crew since Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova’s historic solo flight in 1963.
Past luminaries aboard New Shepard include Star Trek legend William Shatner, former NFL player Michael Strahan, as well as Bezos himself, who flew on the inaugural crewed flight with his brother Mark. Shatner became the oldest person in space at the age to 90.
To date, the company has flown 52 people to suborbital space.
Like Elon Musk – the only person wealthier than him – Bezos has an enduring passion for space.
But while Musk dreams of colonizing Mars, Bezos envisions shifting heavy industry off-planet onto floating space platforms to preserve Earth, “humanity’s blue origin.”
In January, the company successfully launched its giant New Glenn rocket for the first time – a crucial step in its expansion into the lucrative commercial launch sector.
Blue Origin already holds a NASA contract to build a lunar lander for one of the upcoming Artemis missions, which will return Americans to the Moon.
New Glenn will also support the deployment of Project Kuiper, a satellite internet constellation designed to rival Musk’s Starlink.
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