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Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin announced its first all-female crew for its upcoming NS-31 mission, and pop-star Katy Perry is on the list.
The six-person crew, which will launch into space this spring, also includes Bezos’ fiancee and former correspondent Lauren Sanchez, who reportedly “brought the mission together” and will “lead the team of explorers,” according to a statement from Blue Origin. Sanchez is also the Vice Chair of the Bezos Earth Fund and a licensed helicopter pilot.
Joining Sanchez and Perry are CBS (PARA+0.04%) journalist and host Gayle King, former NASA rocket scientist and entrepreneur Aisha Bowe, film producer Kerianne Flynn, and Amanda Nguyen, a bioastronautics research scientist who is also the first Vietnamese and Southeast Asian woman astronaut.
This will be the New Shepard program’s eleventh human flight, and will mark the first all-female flight crew since Soviet astronaut Valentina Tereshkova’s history-making solo spaceflight in 1963 as the first woman in space.
The New Shepard program has now launched more than 50 people into space, as of its latest flight on Tuesday. The flights are often packed with celebrity names, such as Star Trek actor William Shatner. The flights last for a short period of time, taking the space tourists above the Karman line that’s considered the boundary of space, and back.