History is about to be made as Katy Perry, Gayle King, Lauren Sanchez, and three other women prepare to become the first-ever all female crew to launch into space.
Also aboard the flight will be research scientist Amanda Nguyen, filmmaker Kerianne Flynn, and NASA rocket scientist Aisha Bowe.
The star-studded launch is slated for liftoff Monday morning at 9:30 a.m. ET from West Texas, where the women will embark on about an 11-minute spaceflight some 60 miles above the earth where its atmosphere ends.
The mission is planned by the private space company Blue Origin, which is owned by Amazon founder and billionaire Jeff Bezos — who also happens to be Sanchez’s fiancee. It will mark Blue Origin’s 31st spaceflight, and its 11th to carry humans.
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Blue Origin has been ferrying paying customers up to space since 2021. The company doesn’t publicly list its prices, but a deposit for one of the seats on this latest launch were $150,000.
While this will technically be the the first all-female crew to fly into space, the former Soviet Union did send one woman — Valentina Tereshokova — into space on a solo mission back in 1963. Otherwise, men have been a part of every other space launch, meaning this all-female launch marks a new chapter in space exploration history.
“It’s a natural progression from a few years ago where we had the 1st all-female spacewalk, which we like to call an ‘unmanned walk,'” said Kimberly Robinson, director at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center. “And so it’s great. I think it’s a natural progression of things that as women get more and more into the [Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics] fields, that we see them doing more things and getting into more leadership positions and making up in an entire crew.”
“I think it’s extremely encouraging,” Robinson added. “Especially to the women in the nation, but it also is just encouraging in general that space continues to open up its frontiers to more and more people as time goes by.”
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Women do, meanwhile, still have other barriers to break when it comes to space exploration. For example, NASA has sent more than a dozen men to the moon, but never a woman.
The agency plans to change that with the upcoming missions from the Artemis program, which intends to have the first woman — astronaut Christina Koch — orbit the moon in deep space. That mission is set for launch in April 2026.
