Pop singer Katy Perry and presenter Lauren Sánchez, promised with billionaire Jeff Bezos, on Monday completed the first suborbital flight with an exclusively feminine crew of the Blue Origin company.
Perry, Sánchez and four other women took off in the New Shepard rocket from the west of the Texas state at 08h30 local (13h30 GMT), amounted to more than 100 kilometers of altitude and returned to the earth 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, which in total lasted just over ten minutes, the six passengers crossed the Karman line, which marks the boundary between the atmosphere and the outer space, 100 kilometers above sea level, 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 looks at Perry showing the camera the list of songs that he will play on his next tour, which starts at the end of the month in Mexico.
King said that during the Perry flight “What a Wonderful World” by Louis Armstrong.
“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.
– “To inspire Daisy” –
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 Shatner William, 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 Spacex, 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.
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