Katy Perry is going to outer space.
The pop star launches into space with five other women, including journalist Gayle King, on a Blue Origin spacecraft on Monday.
She isn’t nervous about the mission.
“I don’t have any time to be nervous; I ain’t got time to be worried,” Perry told Elle Magazine. “I’m going to feel something when they go, ‘10, 9, 8, 7,…’ but until then we’ve got stuff to do. We’ve got business to handle.”
Blue Origin, a private space company owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, has been taking celebrities and other paying individuals on space joyrides since 2021 on its autonomous New Shepard spacecraft. The upcoming flight, NS-31, will be the 11th human flight on New Shepard.
The women’s journey to space will be brief. The entire trip will only last 11 minutes from liftoff to touchdown. Once the capsule reaches the Kármán line — which sits 62 miles above Earth — the women will enjoy “several minutes of weightlessness and witnessing life-changing views of Earth,” per Blue Origin.
“I have wanted to go to space for almost 20 years,” Perry told Elle. “I was investigating all of the possible commercial options. Even when Blue Origin was first talking about commercial travel to space, I was like, ‘Sign me up! I’m first in line.’ And then they called me, and I was like, ‘Really? I get an invite?‘”
She continued, “I really felt very sure when they sent me the picture of the space pod, because on the front of the pod is a feather, and that’s my mom’s nickname for me.”
What women are on the Blue Origin launch?
Perry and King will be joined by four other women on the spaceflight mission — it is the first all-female spaceflight crew since 1963, per ABC News.
Below are the six women launching into space on the New Shepard spacecraft next week, per Blue Origin.
- Katy Perry, pop star and former “American Idol” judge
- Gayle King, television personality, journalist and “CBS Mornings” co-host
- Aisha Bowe, former NASA rocket scientist and founder of LINGO, a program that teaches students technology skills
- Amanda Nguyen, civil rights activist and bioastronautics research scientist
- Kerianne Flynn, a film producer who worked on the 2018 documentary “This Changes Everything”
- Lauren Sánchez, an Emmy-award winning journalist and author, and the wife of Jeff Bezos
“I read a stat that there’s a huge majority of middle school girls who decide not to pursue STEM fields, although they otherwise would have been interested, because they see them as male-dominated fields,” Bowe told Elle.
She continued, “So this representation really matters. It’s people seeing themselves and being able to show up authentically in their careers in the future.”
How the crew is preparing for launch
Each crew woman is preparing for the journey in their own ways. King has been prepping with meditation practice.
“I’m starting to meditate,” King told Elle. “I have some sessions planned before we go up just to help me with (my anxiety).”
Bowe has been training for the upcoming flight for over a year, but recently “turned up the intensity” with a NASTAR simulation, which imitates the experience of traveling to the edge of space, she told Elle.
“For me, the physical preparation is really important,” Bowe said, per Elle. “I want to have my body know what it feels like to go up.”
In the final days leading up to the launch, the women will meet up at the launch site in Van Horn, Texas, for training camp.
They will be fitted to custom flight suits and undergo a simulation capsule, where they will familiarize themselves with where they will be seated, where oxygen masks are located, how to communicate with ground control and other essential details.
“We want them to be incredibly comfortable with every little thing, even to the point where they’re going to know exactly where each of the cameras is inside of the vehicle, so they can plan out any photos that they want to take and get really ready for what that journey will look like as they go up,” Blue Origin representative Sarah Knights told “Good Morning America” in 2021.
Bringing glam to space
The all-female New Shepard crew will enthusiastically glam up before taking off, they told Elle.
“Who would not get glam before the flight?!” Sánchez said.
Nguyen said, “I think it’s so important for people to see us like that. This dichotomy of engineer and scientist, and then beauty and fashion. We contain multitudes. Women are multitudes. I’m going to be wearing lipstick.”
Bowe said she tested the hairstyle she’s planning to wear on the New Shepard during a skydiving trip in Dubai: ”I also wanted to test out my hair and make sure that it was OK."
“Space is going to finally be glam,” Perry added. “Let me tell you something. If I could take glam up with me, I would do that.”