Baby, she’s a fireworks: Katy Perry is heading into space.
The pop superstar is one of six celebrities scheduled to launch Space of Space on Monday, when it was mounted on capsules and rockets developed by Blue Origin, a private space flight company owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
Perry will be joined by Gail King, co-host of “CBS Morning.” Lauren Sanchez, former journalist and Bezos’ fiancee. Aishabo, a former NASA rocket scientist. Amanda Nuguen, a research scientist at Bioastronauts. Film producer Kerian Flynn.
The entire female crew is scheduled to take place at 9:30am Monday from the Blue Origin launch site in Van Horn, Texas.
Joyride to Space was billed as a historic event featuring the first female-only crew since 1963, when former Soviet Union Valentina Tereshkova began its tracks on a solo mission that lasted just under three days.
On Monday’s flight, Perry and her fellow crew will lift up at the top of Blue Origin’s new Shepherd Rocket, accelerating at more than three times the speed of sound.
The voyage lasts about 10 minutes, bringing six passengers just above the Kalman Line. This is an invisible boundary at an altitude of 62 miles, widely accepted as the edge of the universe.
At that point, the crew experiences several minutes of weightlessness before descending under the parachute and landing in the Texas Desert.
The flight will mark the 11th launch of Blue Origin with a human crew. Named after Alan Shepherd, the first American in the universe, the new Shepherd system is autonomous and designed to fly between suborbital space without the pilot being inside the ship.
Bezos’s company is not accustomed to famous space tourism. Previous flights flew “Star Trek” actor William Shatner. Former New York Giants great Michael Strahan. Laura Shepherd Churchley, daughter of astronaut Alan Shepherd. and Bezos himself.
Tickets on the New Shepherd are believed to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, but Blue Origin did not reveal how much celebrity passengers on Monday’s flight paid for the experience.
