The World’s First All-Female Space Flight Took Place in 1963 in the USSR. Katy Perry Will Be on the Second

Singer Katy Perry is set to be one of the next six individuals to travel to the edge of space aboard a Blue Origin rocket. This historic journey will take place in the spring and will feature an all-female crew, including five other remarkable women. Among them is Lauren Sánchez, fiancée of Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos.

An all-women crew. Blue Origin’s NS-31 mission will be the company’s first to have an all-female crew. Sánchez brought together the mission to “inspire generations to come.” Additionally, it’ll take six prominent women above the Kármán line, a boundary 62 miles above mean sea level where outer space begins.

The all-female crew includes:

• Katy Perry: A pop star with 143 million tracks sold and more than 115 billion streams.
• Lauren Sánchez: A journalist, helicopter pilot, and Bezos’ fiancée.
• Gayle King: A journalist, CBS Mornings co-host, Oprah Daily editor, and Gayle King in the House host.
• Aisha Bowe: A former NASA rocket scientist, STEMBoard CEO, and LINGO founder.
• Amanda Nguyen: A research scientist in bioastronautics, and the future first Vietnamese woman to travel to space.
• Kerianne Flynn: The producer of Lilly, a film that tells the story of Lilly Ledbetter, the women’s equality activist who played a key role in the U.S. Fair Pay Act.

Second all-female space flight in history. Only the Soviet Union has ever conducted a space flight without male crew members. This historic event took place on June 16, 1963, aboard the Vostok 6 capsule, which carried Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman to travel into space.

Blue Origin’s NS-31 mission will be a 10-minute suborbital flight with six crew members. In contrast, Tereshkova flew alone, orbiting the Earth for nearly three days and completing 48 laps. The U.S. didn’t send a woman into space until 1983 when astronaut Sally Ride made her journey.

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NS-31. Blue Origin’s all-women mission is scheduled for spring. It’ll launch from the company’s facility in West Texas using the small New Shepard rocket, which is fueled by liquid oxygen and hydrogen. After launch, the rocket will separate from the spacecraft carrying the six crew members, allowing them to experience a few minutes of weightlessness during a parabolic flight.

The NS-31 mission marks the 11th manned flight in the New Shepard program, which has successfully transported 52 people above the Kármán line to date.

Katy Perry’s reaction. Perry shared the news on Instagram. “If you had told me that I would be part of the first ever all-female crew in space, I would have believed you. Nothing was beyond my imagination as a child. Although we didn’t grow up with much, I never stopped looking at the world with hopeful WONDER!” she wrote.

“I work hard to live my life that way still, and I am motivated more than ever to be an example for my daughter that women should take up space (pun intended). That’s why this opportunity is so incredible–so that I can show all of the youngest & most vulnerable among us to reach for the stars, literally and figuratively. I am honored to be among this diverse group of celestial sisters,” she added.

Images | Nadine Miller | Blue Origin

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