Katy Perry joined five other women as they boarded the Blue Origin vehicle, New Shepard — one of the rockets owned by billionaire and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos — for an eleven-minute journey into space on April 14, 9:30 PM Philippine Time.
In addition to the “California Gurls” singer, the expedition included television presenter Gayle King, film producer Kerianne Flynn, NASA rocket scientist Aisha Bowe, Nobel Peace Prize nominee and bioastronautics research scientist Amanda Nguyen, and journalist and Bezos’s fiancée Lauren Sánchez.
The NS-31 expedition marked Blue Origin’s eleventh human spaceflight. The crew was on a suborbital flight expected to last about eleven minutes, just enough time to reach the edge of space without completing a full orbit around Earth. Perry and the rest of the crew were lofted more than 100 kilometers, or about 60 miles, above the surface of the Earth.
On Instagram, Perry posted a video sharing her discovery during space training that the capsule she will be traveling in is named “Tortoise” and decorated with a “feather” design, both nicknames given to her by her parents. “There are no coincidences, and I’m just so grateful for these confirmations, and so grateful that I feel like something bigger than me is steering the ship,” Perry adds.
Watch the launch on YouTube below:
This marks the first-ever all-female flight since the solo expedition of the Soviet Union’s Valentina Tereshkova in 1963.
Aside from Perry, other notable personalities who have journeyed into space include Star Trek actor William Shatner, who became the oldest person to travel to space in 2021.