Pop star Katy Perry is heading to space alongside Jeff Bezos’s fiancée Lauren Sánchez on a rocket owned by the Blue Origin billionaire that aims to make history with the first all-female crew in more than 60 years.
Blue Origin announced on Thursday that its New Shepard suborbital rocket would make its 11th human flight this spring, taking six women to just beyond the Karman Line, the region 100km above sea level that marks the edge of space.
The company said this would be the first all-female flight crew since Valentina Tereshkova’s solo space flight in 1963.
The flight will last 11 minutes, allowing the crew to experience several minutes of weightlessness. The fully autonomous, reusable vehicle will then return to its launch site in west Texas.
This is not the New Shephard’s first celebrity-stacked mission to space. In 2021, Bezos’s space company flew 90-year-old William Shatner, who starred as Captain James T Kirk in the 1960s TV series Star Trek, into space.
“There is this trend of using celebrity not only to get people excited about space but to feel safe in it,” said Seyka Mejeur, co-founder and chief executive of space industry headhunting company AdAstra.
But the all-female flight, which includes two Black women, comes as President Donald Trump’s administration continues its purge of diversity criteria from state-funded programmes and contracts.
Nasa’s acting administrator Janet Petro promoted three women in a top-level reshuffle of the agency last week, but the space body is now part of Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency cost reviews.
Democrat congresswoman Valerie Foushee of North Carolina said at a meeting of the US House committee on science, space, and technology on Wednesday that she was “appalled at the Trump administration’s attack on every effort to even acknowledge the underrepresentation of women and people of colour in stem fields”.
Mejeur said diversity was crucial for success and ensuring access to the best talent. “It is really important that people aren’t just allowed in space, but are included, feel welcomed and that we have a system that supports that,” she said.
Blue Origin flight’s crew was brought together by Sánchez, a pilot and Emmy award-winning entertainment and news anchor, and includes women from the worlds of entertainment, journalism and science.
In addition to Sánchez and Perry — one of the world’s top best-selling music artists with hits such as “Firework” and “Roar” — the crew will include: Aisha Bowe, a former Nasa rocket scientist and entrepreneur; Amanda Nguyen, an activist and bioastronautics research scientist who worked on the last Nasa shuttle mission; Gayle King, co-host of CBS Mornings and editor-at-large of Oprah Daily; and Kerianne Flynn, a film producer and non-profit worker.
New Shephard flights are largely aimed at the space tourism market, although at a recent space conference, Blue Origin’s chief executive Dave Limp said the spacecraft was a “test bed for almost everything we do”.
The announcement comes just over a month after the company finally flew its heavy-lift New Glenn rocket, which is expected to compete with Musk’s SpaceX to carry payloads into low Earth orbit, the region of space up to 2000km above sea level.