Pop star Katy Perry and journalists Gayle King and Lauren Sanchez, who is also billionaire Jeff Bezos’s fiancée, underwent final preparations this weekend before blasting off into space on a Blue Origin rocket on Monday.
The launch window is scheduled to open at 9:30 am ET, according to the Blue Origin website. The rocket will blast off from the company’s West Texas launch site.
The mission consists of the first all-female flight crew in more than six decades. Other crew members include astrophysicist Aisha Bowe, activist and bioastronautics researcher Amanda Nguyen and filmmaker Kerianne Flynn.
The New Shepard rocket, an 18-metre suborbital spacecraft, will carry the crew to the Kármán line, the internationally recognized boundary of space, Bezos-owned Blue Origin said in a statement published on Feb. 27.
Passengers will experience a few minutes of microgravity before returning to Earth via parachute-assisted landing in the West Texas desert.
This is the 11th human flight for the rocket and its 31st overall. The last recorded all-female spaceflight was the 1963 solo mission of Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space.