Blue Origin Launch: Gayle King and Katy Perry onboard as part of a celebrity space team

WASHINGTON — Pop icon Katy Perry, journalist Gayle King and Jeff Bezos’ fiancée Lauren Sanchez will head to space Monday morning as part of an all-female space crew.

The crew will take off on Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket for a 10-minute spaceflight from West Texas. It will be Blue Origin’s 11th human flight. 

According to the company, the New Shepard launch window is slated to open at 9:30 a.m. Eastern Time. 

The spaceflight, named NS-31, will lift off from Launch Site One in West Texas. 

Sanchez, a helicopter pilot and former TV journalist, is the fiancée of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. She was the one who picked the all-female crew. Perry, Sanchez and King will be joined by Aisha Bowe, a former NASA rocket scientist who now heads an engineering firm, research scientist Amanda Nguyen and movie producer Kerianne Flynn.

Blue Origin has flown tourists on short hops to space since 2021, after Bezos climbed aboard with his brother for the inaugural trip; the upcoming trip will be the company’s 11th human spaceflight. Some passengers have received free rides, while others have paid a hefty sum to experience weightlessness. The company declined to comment on who is footing the bill for Monday’s flight.

Blue Origin’s primary launch facility is Launch Site One in West Texas. 

The news of the upcoming trip has not been without critiques, most recently from actor Olivia Munn, who bemoaned the mission’s cost and publicity. But Perry believes an all-women crew — the first since Valentina Tereshkova’s solo spaceflight in 1963 — has historic ramifications. Only 14% of people who have gone to space so far have been women.