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Blue Origin’s next crewed flight mission aboard its tourism rocket, expected to lift off this spring, will carry an all-female crew to space.
Journalist Gayle King, singer Katy Perry and bioastronautics research scientist Amanda Nguyen are among the six-person crew who will launch on the New Shepard vehicle. They will be joined by Aisha Bowe, a former NASA rocket scientist and CEO of STEMBoard, and Kerianne Flynn, a film producer who has conducted nonprofit work with The Allen-Stevenson School, The High Line and Hudson River Park.
Lauren Sánchez, a pilot, journalist and vice chair of the Bezos Earth Fund, “brought the mission together” and will also be on the flight, according to Blue Origin. Sánchez is also engaged to the company’s founder, Jeff Bezos.
“She is honored to lead a team of explorers on a mission that will challenge their perspectives of Earth, empower them to share their own stories, and create lasting impact that will inspire generations to come,” according to a statement from Blue Origin.
Nguyen, who was a 2019 Nobel Peace Prize nominee for her advocacy for sexual violence survivors, will be the first Vietnamese and Southeast Asian woman astronaut.
The mission, known as NS-31, will be New Shepard’s 11th flight carrying humans past the Kármán line, an area 62 miles (100 kilometers) above Earth’s surface that is widely recognized as the altitude at which outer space begins — but there’s a lot of gray area.
Blue Origin has not announced a specific date for the mission.
The company, founded by Bezos in 2000, said the mission will be the first all-female flight crew since Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova’s solo spaceflight in 1963. Since its inception, NASA has selected 61 women to be astronauts, and the first all-female spacewalk, carried out by NASA astronauts Christina Koch and Jessica Meir, occurred outside the International Space Station in October 2019.
The number of women who have been to space has increased as space tourism has grown. In November, Emily Calandrelli, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology engineer and TV host known as “Space Gal,” became the 100th woman to venture into space aboard Blue Origin’s NS-28 mission.