[Image: Blue Origin / Facebook]
Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin is preparing to launch an all-female flight into space, including his fiancé Lauren Sánchez and popstar Katy Perry.
The launch from Texas of the reusable New Shepard vehicle, operated by Jeff Bezos’s space company, is scheduled for 15:30 on Monday (SA Time).
Joining the all-civilian crew are US morning television presenter Gayle King, aerospace engineer Aisha Bowe, activist and scientist Amanda Nguyen, and entrepreneur Kerianne Flynn. Blue Origin noted that this will be the first time since Russian cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova’s solo flight in 1963 that a spacecraft will fly with only women aboard.
View this post on Instagram
The suborbital flight is expected to last just over 10 minutes and reach an altitude of 100km, taking the six passengers just above the Kármán line, an invisible boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and space. They will experience several minutes of weightlessness and witness views of Earth through windows that take up more than one-third of the capsule’s surface area.
To date, the New Shepard spacecraft has carried 52 people beyond the Earth’s atmosphere, with Bezos himself as part of the rocket’s inaugural crewed flight in 2021.
Expect your Instagram feed to be carpet-bombed over the next few days with videos of Katy Perry singing, “Oh, oh, oh”, as she shoots across the sky. Godspeed, ladies.
You can watch the live launch here.
[Source: 10Play]
