Pop singer Katy Perry and presenter Lauren Sánchez, committed to billionaire Jeff Bezos, completed this Monday 14.04.2025) the first suborbital flight with an exclusively feminine crew, aboard a Blue Origin rocket.
Perry, Sánchez and four other women took off in the New Shepard rocket from the west of the state of Texas at 08h30 local, amounted to more than 100 km of altitude and returned to the ground about ten minutes later in a capsule of the aerospace company owned by Bezos.
“Going to space is incredible and I wanted to be a model of courage, merit and courage,” said the American singer when leaving the capsule.
The completely automated rocket took off vertically and the capsule separated during the flight, before returning to the ground stopped by a parachute and a retropropulsor.
In addition to the American singer and Sánchez, the CBS Mornings Gayle King program, the scientist research scientist Amanda Nguyen, the ex -specialist in Nasa Aisha Bowe and the film producer Kerianne Flynn participated in the flight.
During the trip, the six passengers exceeded the Karman line that is located 100 km above sea level and marks the border with the space, according to the international convention.
A video broadcast during a Blue Origin press conference at the end of the mission shows the six crew floating inside the capsule during the flight.
It see the singer showing the camera the list of songs that she will play on her next tour, which starts at the end of the month in Mexico.
King said that during the Katy Perry flight he sang “What a Wonderful World”, the 1967 theme popularized by Louis Armstrong.
Space Tourism trips
“It’s not about me, it’s not about my songs,” Perry confirmed, for whom the objective of the flight was “to give a place to the women of the future.”
Baptized NS-31, it was the first space flight composed exclusively of women, from the historic solo journey of the Cosmonaut and Soviet engineer Valentina Tereshkova, in 1963.
It is the eleventh suborbital flight that Blue Origin performs, which since 2021 offers space tourism trips in its New Shepard rocket. The prices of these trips are not public.
The rise of space tourism has been criticized for its elitist character and for the pollution that these flights give off.
In a recent interview with Elle magazine, Perry explained that he undertook the adventure to inspire his daughter Daisy to “never put limits to his dreams.”
To date, Blue Origin has taken 52 people to the suborbital space in 10 manned missions.
Among the celebrities who in the past traveled aboard the New Shepard are William Shatner, legendary actor of the Star Trek science fiction saga, and Jeff Bezos himself, who was on the inaugural flight with a crew.
Bezos competes with the company Virgin Galactic, which also offers suborbital flights. But Blue Origin also has the ambition to go further in the flight market in orbit and compete with Space X, of the richest man in the world Elon Musk.
In January, he successfully completed his first unmanned orbital flight, using a much more powerful pitcher called New Glenn.
MG (AFP, CNN)
