Great expectations for the all -female flight of Blue Originscheduled for today at 9.30 local time (15.30 in Italy) leaving from Western Texas, when the pop star Katy Perry And five other equally famous passengers will be launched in the space aboard the New Shepard rocket. He promises to be a primacy: a space vehicle will fly with only women on board, after the solo flight of the Russian cosmonaut Valentina Turesthkova, in 1963
Crew of women alone: The pink crew ‘recruited’ by Jeff Bezos is made up of successful and famous women: in addition to the iconic singer Perry, the television presenter Gayle King, the producer Kerianne Flynn, the former NASA scientist Aisha Bowe, the civil rights activist Amanda Nguyen and the journalist Lauren Sanchez. The promotional material for the flight states that Katy Perry “hopes that his journey encourages his daughter and others to reach the stars, literally and figuratively”.
What will happen on board the New Shepard: Like all Blue Origin launches, the vehicle will take off from the Lauch Site One of Corn Ranch, a private ranch in the rural area of Western Texas, over 225 kilometers east of El Paso. Blue Origin said he wanted to stream the launch, whose details will soon be published. The New Shepard rocket, a 18 -meter sub -tall spatial vehicle, will transport the entire crew to the Karman line, the border of the space recognized internationally. The crew capsule will separate from the rocket three minutes after take off. Its speed will be three times higher than that of sound.
Once you reach this line, 100 kilometers above the earth, about the fourth minute, the passengers will make the belts to float in the absence of weight and admire our planet, thus living about three minutes of microgravity. They will observe their path from six windows, about 1.2 meters high, one for each occupant. Blue Origin states that they are the largest windows ever overlooking the space, which occupy a third of the surface of the cabin. The capsule is equipped with handrail to allow movement. According to the programs, the capsule will then return gently to Earth with a landfall bruise, near the launch site in the western Texas desert, while the rocket will land independently. The space vehicle operates autonomously and does not have a pilot. (
Past and future of Blue Origin: Blue Origin has already carried out 30 missions, 10 of which have brought 52 people to the boundaries of space. Jeff Bezos participated in the first flight with a crew of the spacecraft, the NS-16, in 2021. That flight followed 15 trial flights. Blue Origin is one of the three companies of rockets to which launch contracts were assigned for a total of 13.7 billion dollars from the Space Systems Command of the US Space Force for national security launches.
The Blue Origin contract amounted to about 2.4 billion dollars per seven launches. This contract designates New Glenn, the largest rocket of Blue Origin, for missions in orbits that require high -performance launch systems and mission guarantee, as a launch vehicle certified by the Space Systems Command. The New Glenn rocket is over 97 meters high. This heavy load rocket is able to transport a useful load of over 12,800 kilos in geostationary orbit of transfer and 44,000 kilos in low earth orbit. His first test launch, called NG-1, was carried out last January.
Beyond the glamor, the challenges of women in science (but not only): As Jasleen Chana, a doctoranda at the University College London (UCL) recalls in the Department of Scientific and Technological Studies, in an in -depth analysis on the specialized website “Space.com”: “The glamorous perspective of this space flight is presumably designed to encourage women to fight for their dreams. The glossy narrative tells others that they can be just like these extraordinary women. A more problematic story that concerns successful women in science and their role in public, more generally ».