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More than 60 years have passed since a woman traveled into space without a man, and now six are set to blast off from Earth.
Katy Perry, Lauren Sanchez, Gayle King, Amanda Nguyen, Aisha Bowe, and filmmaker Kerianne Flynn are scheduled to launch in Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin rocket on Sunday.
This will be the latest flight of the New Shepard program, named NS-31, aiming to “create a lasting impact that will inspire generations” with the women forming the first all-female crew since Russian engineer Valentina Tereshkova’s solo flight into space in 1963.
The planned flight of the New Shepard rocket. Pic: Blue Origin
The trip is expected to last around 11 minutes, with the reusable self-driving rocket to take off from Launch Site One in West Texas at 8:30 AM local time (2:30 PM BST) on Monday. It will reach a maximum height of 100km (62 miles) above Earth, with the women technically entering space as the capsule crosses the Karman line, internationally recognized as the boundary of space.
They will not, however, be classified as astronauts by the Federal Aviation Administration, NASA, or the US military, which have different eligibility requirements for people to become commercial astronauts.
