Jeff Bezos announced on Thursday that an all-female crew would helm the next flight into space of a Blue Origin rocket. The singer Katy Perry will join the television host Gayle King, the civil rights activist Amanda Nguyen, the movie producer Kerianne Flynn, the former Nasa rocket scientist Aisha Bowe and Bezos’s fiancee, Lauren Sánchez, on a short hop from a west Texas launchpad this spring.
The 11th crewed mission of its New Shepard capsule, which the billionaire’s space company announced in a press release, will mark the first time since Russian cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova’s solo flight in 1963 that no men have been aboard a human-crewed spaceflight leaving Earth, Blue Origin said.
Sánchez, a former journalist, author and pilot who became engaged to Bezos last year, picked the crew and has been instrumental in arranging the 10-minute flight, according to the statement. Perry, one of the bestselling musical artists of all time, is also a philanthropist and United Nations goodwill ambassador for children.
King, who co-hosts the CBS Mornings news show, played a video on the program on Thursday to preview her flight. “You can’t possibly go up there and not come back unchanged,” she said.
Nguyen and Bowe, meanwhile, have both previously worked for Nasa. Bowe is now chief executive of the engineering company STEMBoard and founder of Lingo, an initiative to provide technology education and equipment to students.
Since leaving Nasa, where she worked in research and on the final space shuttle mission in 2011 as an intern, Nguyen, an astrophysicist, has become a vocal advocate for survivors of sexual violence, and has been nominated for the Nobel peace prize and Time’s person of the year.
Describing her as the first Vietnamese and south-east Asian female astronaut, Blue Origin said Nguyen’s flight was “a symbol of reconciliation between the US and Vietnam, and will highlight science as a tool for peace”.
The flight for Sánchez means both she and Bezos will have flown aboard New Shepard. The Amazon founder and Washington Post owner took a seat on its first flight in July 2021, describing the experience as “the best day ever”.
Since then, Blue Origin has flown 52 people above the Kármán line, the internationally recognized boundary of space.
