Katy Perry and Gayle King are among 6 women headed to space aboard New Shepard
Amanda Nguyen, Katy Perry, Aisha Bowe (top, left to right) will join Kerianne Flynn, Gayle King and Lauren Sánchez (bottom, left to right) on the New Shepard flight.
Shutterstock/Reuters/Getty Images
Blue Origin’s next crewed flight mission aboard its tourism rocket, expected to lift off this spring, will carry an all-female crew to space.
Journalist Gayle King, singer Katy Perry and bioastronautics research scientist Amanda Nguyen are among the six-person crew who will launch on the New Shepard vehicle. They will be joined by Aisha Bowe, a former NASA rocket scientist and CEO of STEMBoard, and Kerianne Flynn, a film producer who has conducted nonprofit work with The Allen-Stevenson School, The High Line and Hudson River Park.
Lauren Sánchez, a pilot, journalist and vice chair of the Bezos Earth Fund, “brought the mission together” and will also be on the flight, according to Blue Origin. Sánchez is also engaged to the company’s founder, Jeff Bezos.
“She is honored to lead a team of explorers on a mission that will challenge their perspectives of Earth, empower them to share their own stories, and create lasting impact that will inspire generations to come,” according to a statement from Blue Origin.
Nguyen, who was a 2019 Nobel Peace Prize nominee for her advocacy for sexual violence survivors, will be the first Vietnamese and Southeast Asian woman astronaut.
The mission, known as NS-31, will be New Shepard’s 11th flight carrying humans past the Kármán line, an area 62 miles (100 kilometers) above Earth’s surface that is widely recognized as the altitude at which outer space begins — but there’s a lot of gray area. Blue Origin has not announced a specific date for the mission.
The company, founded by Bezos in 2000, said the mission will be the first all-female flight crew since Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova’s solo spaceflight in 1963. Since its inception, NASA has selected 61 women to be astronauts, and the first all-female spacewalk, carried out by NASA astronauts Christina Koch and Jessica Meir, occurred outside the International Space Station in October 2019.
The number of women who have been to space has increased as space tourism has grown. In November, Emily Calandrelli, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology engineer and TV host known as “Space Gal,” became the 100th woman to venture into spaceaboard Blue Origin’s NS-28 mission.
Quelle: CNN
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Update: 13.04.2025
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'I'm really excited about the engineering of it all.' Katy Perry is psyched for her Blue Origin launch on April 14
The pop star is leaning into STEM ahead of her spaceflight.
Katy Perry is about to blast off like a firework on her Blue Origin rocket launch this Monday.
Blue Origin will launch its eleventh crewed flight on April 14, with pop star Katy Perry strapping into the New Shepard space capsule alongside five other passengers, all of them women. The mission, NS-31, will be the first all-female crew since the Soviet Union's Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space during a solo flight in 1963.
"Im really excited about the engineering of it all," Perry told the Associated Press, adding that she's been listening to Carl Sagan's "Cosmos" and reading about string theory. "I've always been interested astrophysics and interested in astronomy and astrology and the stars." You can watch Blue Origin's Katy Perry launch on Space.com and our YouTube channel.
Joining Perry on the Blue Origin launch will be "CBS Mornings" co-host Gayle King, bioastronautics research scientist Amanda Nguyen, STEMBoard CEO and former NASA rocket scientist Aisha Bowe, filmmaker Kerianne Flynn and mission leader Lauren Sánchez, the fiancee of Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos.
Blue Origin will launch Perry and crew from the company's Launch Site One, in West Texas, Monday morning. It will fly a suborbital trajectory that will give its crew several minutes of weightless to float around. Their New Shepard will land under parachutes on the desert floor to end the trip. The whole ride will take about 10 minutes.A livestream of the New Shepard launch will begin about 15 minutes before liftoff, on Blue Origin's website. It will also be simulcast on the Blue Origin YouTubeand X accounts.
"I feel like we are all made of stardust and we all come from the stars, and it will be exciting to see them twinkle from that site," Perry told the AP. "And also have an appreciation for Mother Earth when we see it in that way."
Quelle: SC
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How to watch Blue Origin launch Katy Perry and crew to space on a historic all-female spaceflight on April 14
Do you think they'll listen to 'Firework' on the way up?
Blue Origin's eleventh space tourism launch carries a crew that features some notable celebrities, and you can watch the mission live here at Space.com.
The 31st overall mission of Blue Origin's New Shepard suborbital vehicle (known as NS-31) will launch a six women — the first all-female space crew since the Soviet Union's Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman to fly in space during a solo mission to orbit in 1963. The NS-31 crew are pop star Katy Perry, "CBS Mornings" co-host Gayle King, author and bioastronautics research scientist Amanda Nguyen, STEMBoard CEO and former NASA rocket scientist Aisha Bowe, film producer Kerianne Flynn and mission leader Lauren Sánchez, who is the partner of Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos.
Blue Origin is targeting 9:30 a.m. EDT (1330 GMT) on Monday (April 14) for liftoff of NS-31 from the company's Launch Site One, about 30 miles (50 kilometers) north of Van Horn, Texas. A livestream of the New Shepard launch will be available on Blue Origin's website about 15 minutes before liftoff, and it will be simulcast on YouTube and the Blue Origin X account. The broadcast will also be carried at the top of this page as well as the Space.com homepage and YouTube channel.
The flight will last a little more than 10 minutes from liftoff to the soft, parachute-aided touchdown of the NS-31 crew capsule downrange in the Texas desert. Between engine ignition and landing, the NS-31 flight will go through about 10 major milestones.
The New Shepard booster will separate from the crew capsule 2 minutes and 40 seconds after liftoff. From there, the capsule will continue on a trajectory arc reaching above an altitude of 62 miles (100 kilometers) — the internationally recognized "boundary" of space known as the Kármán line.
The NS-31 crew will experience several minutes of weightlessness while soaking in views of Earth through the capsule's very large, 3.6-foot (1.1-meter) windows. As the crew enjoys floating around the capsule, the 60-foot-tall (18 m) New Shepard booster will use a set of aerobrakes to control its descent before reigniting its engine for a controlled touchdown on the Blue Origin landing pad, 2 miles (3.2 km) north of the launch site.
Minutes later, the New Shepard capsule will begin its descent back to Earth, deploying a set of drogue parachutes and main parachutes that will enable a soft desert landing 10 to 11 minutes after liftoff.
Blue Origin's launch window for the NS-31 mission opens at 9:30 a.m. EDT (1330 GMT), but the company may push later into the morning if there are any launch delays. Historically, New Shepard launches have been pushed up to an hour or more, as a result issues with the launch vehicle or ground infrastructure.
In the event of a delay prior to the start of Blue Origin's livestream, the broadcast will be similarly delayed to begin about 15 minutes ahead of a new T-0 launch target.
Quelle: SC
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Update: 14.04.2025
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Katy Perry, Gayle King and 4 other women are headed for the ‘edge of space.’ Here’s what that means
Blue Origin is taking a star-studded crew of six female passengers to the edge of space on Monday in one of the most closely watched suborbital space tourism missions in years.
The flight will last about 10 minutes — carrying the group more than 100 kilometers (62 miles) into the sky and offering a few minutes of weightlessness before they descend.
But at what point during the flight will singer Katy Perry, journalist Gayle King and their fellow passengers reach “space”?
Is it when they look outside their window and the blue glow of the sky fades to black? Is it when they reach an altitude at which satellites can orbit? Or is it when the atmosphere grows so thin that it no longer plays a defining role in the flight physics?
In the spaceflight community, there is no hard-and-fast definition.
Space can be defined in several ways, and the usefulness of the criteria for determining where it starts can depend on the scenario. That’s why various organizations around the world use different altitudes to mark that invisible threshold for recordkeeping purposes.
And for suborbital space tourism, quibbling over definitions can take on a life of its own.
Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic, for example, have been known to spar publicly over the matter — mostly because of one, specific means of defining space: the Kármán line.
How far is the Kármán line from Earth's surface?
As Blue Origin prepares for its next launch of the New Shepard rocket, we take a closer look at arguably the most well-known and controversial demarcation of space.
Height 300 miles (482.8km) International Space Station 250 miles