Blue Origin's historic all-female space mission revealed

Pop star Katy Perry, journalists Gayle King, and Lauren Sanchez, billionaire Jeff Bezos's fiancée, are set to launch into space on a Blue Origin rocket. This will be the first all-female flight crew in over six decades.

Bezos-owned Blue Origin said in a statement that the New Shepard rocket, a 59-foot (18-meter) suborbital spacecraft, will carry the crew to the Kármán line, the internationally recognized boundary of space.

Passengers will experience a few minutes of microgravity before returning to Earth via parachute-assisted landing in the West Texas desert.

The rest of the crew consists of NASA rocket scientist Aisha Bowe, bioastronautics researcher Amanda Nguyen, and movie producer Kerianne Flynn.

The company has not disclosed a date for the mission.

"Missions like this can be an effective PR tactic to bring in the private money needed to reduce costs in the long run," said Professor Ehud Behar, an astrophysicist at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology.

"Ultimately, these investments also support the launch of scientific and commercial instruments into space - not just people."

This is the rocket's 11th human flight and 31st overall. The last recorded all-female spaceflight was the 1963 solo mission of Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space.

New Shepard's first crewed flight in July 2021 carried Jeff Bezos and his brother Mark.

Since then, the rocket has taken former NFL player Michael Strahan and Star Trek actor William Shatner, who became the oldest person in space at 90.

The company's giant New Glenn rocket blasted off from Florida last month on its first mission to space. This is an inaugural step into Earth's orbit for Jeff Bezos's space company, which aims to rival SpaceX in the satellite launch business.