Blue Origin announces all-female New Shepard flight with Katy Perry, Gayle King
Blue Origin has lined up what would be the first all-female crew to launch to space since a Soviet woman’s solo launch in 1963, and that one had a lot less Grammy winners on board.
Pop singer Katy Perry and CBS Mornings co-host Gayle King are among the six woman announced as crew on the NS-31 mission for the suborbital New Shepard rocket set to launch this spring.
Others slated to fly include Aisha Bowe, Amanda Nguyen, Kerianne Flynn, and Lauren Sánchez.
Sánchez, who is engaged to Jeff Bezos, the founder of Blue Origin, is a former entertainment TV journalist. She organized the crew. Bowe is a former NASA rocket scientist, Nguyen a bioastronautics research scientist and Flynn built a career in fashion and then produced films including “This Changes Everything.”
New Shepard flights launch passengers from Blue Origin’s West Texas facilities on short 10- to 12-minute rides that travel above the Karman line, about 62 miles high, the internationally recognized altitude of having reached space.
Passengers experience a few minutes of weightlessness and can see the curvature of the Earth before their capsule returns for a parachute-assisted landing.
New Shepard boosters and capsules have flown 30 times so far, with 10 of those missions having taken up 52 humans since 2021, including four who have flown twice.
Bezos was on the first one back in 2021 while other flights have taken up the likes of Star Trek’s William Shatner, NFL Hall of Famer and “Good Morning America” co-host Michael Strahan and Laura Shepard Churchley, daughter of Alan Shepard, the first American in space for whom the rocket is named.
Central Florida couple Marc and Sharon Hagle were among the four who have been two-time riders, having taken the trip in both 2022 and this past November. Another Central Floridian to take the trip was Brevard County millionaire Steve Young.
The last time a spaceflight had only females on board was the solo flight by Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova who became the first woman in space on June 16, 1963 on the Vostok 6 mission.
Blue Origin has been a fan of knocking out superlatives with its New Shepard rocket having flown the tallest (Strahan at 6 feet 5 inches tall), the oldest (90-year-old Ed Dwight Jr.) and youngest (18-year-old Oliver Daemen) people to space.
The space tourism flights are just part of Bezos’ company’s business. It flew the much larger heavy-left New Glenn rocket from Cape Canaveral for the first time this past January. Also on Blue Origin’s plate are plans for a commercial space station and the Blue Moon lunar lander.