From BBC
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BBC Climate & Science reporter
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Pop star Katy Perry and five other women are set to blast into space aboard Jeff Bezos’ space tourism rocket.
The singer will be joined by Bezos’s fiancée Lauren Sánchez and CBS presenter Gayle King.
The New Shepard rocket is due to lift off from its West Texas launch site and the launch window opens at 08:30 local time (14:30 BST).
The flight will last around 11 minutes and take the crew more than 100km (62 miles) above Earth, crossing the internationally recognised boundary of space and giving the crew a few moments of weightlessness.
Also on board are former Nasa rocket scientist Aisha Bowe, civil rights activist Amanda Nguyen, and film producer Kerianne Flynn.
The spacecraft is fully autonomous, requiring no pilots, and the crew will not manually operate the vehicle.
The capsule will return to Earth with a parachute-assisted soft landing, while the rocket booster will land itself around two miles away from the launch site.
“If you had told me that I would be part of the first-ever all-female crew in space, I would have believed you. 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!” Mrs Perry said in a social media post.
Blue Origin says the last all-female spaceflight was over 60 years ago when Soviet Cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman to
