This spring, Blue Origin plans to launch a manned flight of the New Shepard rocket with an all-female crew. The team will consist of six women: journalist Gayle King, singer Katy Perry, bio-astronaut Amanda Nguyen, former NASA engineer and STEMBoard leader Aisha Bowe, film producer Kerianne Flynn, and Lauren Sánchez, a pilot, journalist, and vice chair of the Bezos Earth Fund. The latter is also engaged to the company’s founder Jeff Bezos and initiated the mission.
Participation in the flight will be especially symbolic for Amanda Nguyen, who was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019 for her fight for the rights of victims of sexual violence. She will be the first female astronaut from Vietnam and Southeast Asia.
The mission is called NS-31 and will be the 11th New Shepard flight to cross the Kármán line, a conventional boundary between the Earth’s atmosphere and space at an altitude of 100 km. The exact launch date has not yet been announced.
The flight will be historic, as it is the first mission with an all-female crew since the solo flight of Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova in 1963. Since then, NASA has selected 61 women for space missions, and in 2019, astronauts Christina Koch and Jessica Meir made the first-ever all-female spacewalk.
With the development of space tourism, the number of women in space is gradually increasing. In November 2023, MIT engineer and TV presenter Emily Calandrelli became the 100th woman to fly in space aboard Blue Origin’s NS-28.
Earlier, we reported how Blue Origin made its 10th space flight with a mystery passenger.
Provided by blueorigin.com
