American singer and songwriter Katy Perry is getting blasted into space today, part of an all-female mission run by private space firm Blue Origin.
The 40-year-old singer of such hits as I Kissed a Girl and Roar will head 100 kilometers (60 miles) above the Earth today from a launchpad in Western Texas at around 9:30 am EDT (2:30 pm BST). On board the reusable New Shepard sub-orbital launch vehicle with Perry will be former NASA rocket scientist Aisha Bowe, bioastronautics research scientist Amanda Nguyễn, movie producer Kerianne Flynn, journalist and TV personality Gayle King, and journalist Lauren Sánchez, who is engaged to Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos.
The 10-11 minute flight will see the crew accelerate to over three times the speed of sound before the capsule detaches. At this point, they can unbuckle and feel the effects of weightlessness, before rebuckling for reentry into the Earth’s atmosphere three minutes later. Passengers will land in the West Texas desert with assistance from a parachute deployed by the capsule, where they will be met by a landing crew.
While the flight is suborbital, the crew and passengers will cross the Kármán line, internationally recognized as the boundary of space.
“While there’s really no clear boundary between where Earth’s atmosphere ends and outer space begins, most scientists use a delineation known as the Karman line, located 100 kilometers (62 miles) above Earth’s surface, to denote the transition point, since 99.99997 percent of Earth’s atmosphere lies beneath this point,” NASA explains. “A February 2019 study using data from the NASA/European Space Agency Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) spacecraft suggests, however, that the farthest reaches of Earth’s atmosphere – a cloud of hydrogen atoms called the geocorona – may actually extend nearly 391,000 miles (629,300 kilometers) into space, far beyond the orbit of the Moon.”
If we used the geocorona as the boundary of space, that would mean that no astronaut has ever left the Earth’s atmosphere, which might be news to e.g. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin.
Perry has made it clear that there will be singing during the flight, something usually a little lacking during space travel.
As well as being a potentially musical flight, the commercial mission has drawn attention for being an all-female crew.
“If you had told me that I would be part of the first ever all-female crew in space, I would have believed you,” Perry wrote on Facebook back in February.
“Nothing was beyond my imagination as a child. Although we didn’t grow up with much, I never stopped looking at the world with hopeful WONDER! I work hard to live my life that way still, and I am motivated more than ever to be an example for my daughter that women should take up space (pun intended). That’s why this opportunity is so incredible – so that I can show all of the youngest & most vulnerable among us to reach for the stars, literally and figuratively. I am honored to be among this diverse group of celestial sisters.”
While the mission is an all-female crew, people have pointed out that they were beaten by Valentina Tereshkova, the Soviet cosmonaut who flew solo to space two years after Yuri Gagarin became the first human to make it to space.
Perhaps unsurprisingly given the media, the crew have been asked a lot more about appearances than e.g. Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong and Michael Collins were ahead of their own missions.
“Space is going to finally be glam. Let me tell you something. If I could take glam up with me, I would do that,” Perry told Elle during an interview. “We are going to put the ‘ass’ in astronaut.”
“I think it’s so important for people to see us like that. This dichotomy of engineer and scientist, and then beauty and fashion,” Nguyen added. “We contain multitudes. Women are multitudes. I’m going to be wearing lipstick.”
While this is a commercial flight, with spaces reserved for an eye-watering $150,000, there will be a small amount of science taking place, with Bowe conducting three research experiments “including studies on plant biology and human physiology” during the short flight.
The flight will take place at around 9:30 am EDT (2:30 pm BST), and can be streamed above or on the Blue Origin website.
Source Link: Watch Live As Katy Perry Finally Gets Blasted Into Space With All-Female Crew