The singer Katy Perry will join television host Gayle King, civil rights activist Amanda Nguyen, movie producer Kerianne Flynn, former Nasa rocket scientist Aisha Bowe and Bezos’s fiancee, Lauren Sánchez, on a short hop from a west Texas launchpad this spring.
The 11th crewed mission of its New Shepard capsule, which the billionaire’s space company announced in a press release, will mark the first time since Russian cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova’s solo flight in 1963 that no men have been aboard a human-crewed spaceflight leaving Earth, Blue Origin said.
Since leaving Nasa, where she worked in research and on the final space shuttle mission in 2011 as an intern, Nguyen, an astrophysicist, has become a vocal advocate for survivors of sexual violence, and has been nominated for the Nobel peace prize and Time’s person of the year.
Activist Amanda Nguyen, movie producer Kerianne Flynn and former Nasa scientist Aisha Bowe will also be on flight.
Describing her as the first Vietnamese and south-east Asian female astronaut, Blue Origin said Nguyen’s flight was “a symbol of reconciliation between the US and Vietnam, and will highlight science as a tool for peace”.
