Celebrity-laden Blue Origin rocket set to launch Monday
Baby, she’s a firework: Katy Perry is heading to space.
The pop superstar is one of six celebrities scheduled to launch to the edge of space on Monday aboard a capsule and rocket developed by Blue Origin, the private spaceflight company owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
Perry will be joined by Gayle King, co-host of “CBS Mornings”; Lauren Sánchez, a former journalist and Bezos’ fiancée; Aisha Bowe, a former NASA rocket scientist; Amanda Nguyen, a bioastronautics research scientist; and Kerianne Flynn, a movie producer.
The all-female crew is scheduled to lift off Monday at 9:30 a.m. ET from Blue Origin’s launch site in Van Horn, Texas.
The joyride to space has been billed as a historic event, featuring the first female-only crew since 1963, when Valentina Tereshkova of the former Soviet Union became the first woman in space when she launched into orbit on a solo mission that lasted slightly under three days.
On Monday’s flight, Perry and her fellow crew members will lift off atop Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket, accelerating at more than three times the speed of sound.
The voyage will last roughly 10 minutes, taking the six passengers just above the Kármán line, an invisible boundary at an altitude of 62 miles that is widely accepted as the edge of space.
At that point, the crew will experience a few minutes of weightlessness before descending under parachutes and landing in the Texas desert.
The flight will be Blue Origin’s 11th launch with a human crew. The New Shepard system — named after Alan Shepard, the first American in space — is autonomous and designed to fly to and from suborbital space without a pilot on board.
Bezos’ company is no stranger to high-profile space tourism. Previous flights have flown “Star Trek” actor William Shatner; former New York Giants great Michael Strahan; Laura Shepard Churchley, the daughter of astronaut Alan Shepard; and Bezos himself.
A ticket aboard New Shepard is thought to cost several hundreds of thousands of dollars, but Blue Origin did not disclose how much — if anything — the celebrity passengers on Monday’s flight paid for the experience.
