Blue Origin all-women flight: What’s ‘edge of space’ where Katy Perry, 5 others are headed?

Blue Origin’s all-female flight is set to lift off Monday (April 14) evening. American pop star Katy Perry and journalist Gayle King are among the five “guests” of Lauren Sánchez, journalist and Jeff Bezos’ fiancée, heading to the edge of space with her.

The star-studded crew will blast into space on a Blue Origin rocket – the New Shepard. The women will experience microgravity for a few seconds before returning to Earth under parachutes.

What is the edge of space where the all-female crew will travel to? We will explain.

What’s the edge of space?

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space company is taking six women to the edge of space and back. The NS-31 mission is touted as the first all-female crew to reach the Kármán line.

This line is the globally recognised boundary of space that lies 100 kilometres above sea level. Blue Origin’s New Shepard flight will travel just past this altitude.

There has always been debate about defining space. In the 1900s, Hungarian physicist Theodore von Kármán determined the boundary of space to be around 80 kilometers above sea level.

Today, the Kármán line is set at 100 km above sea level, which the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) describes as “an imaginary boundary”.

“The atmosphere is indeed dynamic and fluctuates in density which makes any delimitation imprecise,” a 2014 study on the definition of space said. So, “the Kármán line fluctuates between” 84 kilometres and 100 kilometres.

The US government uses the 81-kilometre mark to define space. Nasa Mission Control puts the space boundary at 122 kilometres above Earth because that is “the point at which atmospheric drag becomes noticeable,” Bhavya Lal and Emily Nightingale of the Science and Technology Policy Institute wrote in a 2014 review article.

Who is an ‘astronaut’?

It depends on who you ask. The US government awards astronaut badges to military and Nasa pilots who fly beyond 81 kilometres.

The US Federal Aviation Administration granted astronaut wings to commercial space travellers who went above 81 kilometres before doing away with the practice a few years back.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX has given its silver wings to nongovernment passengers who fly on its Crew Dragon capsule.

Some argue that getting into orbit should be used to define an astronaut.

However, former Nasa astronaut Terry Virts told National Geographic in 2018 that he does not agree.

“If you’re strapping your butt to a rocket, I think that’s worth something,” he said when asked about the issue. “When I was an F-16 pilot, I didn’t feel jealous about Cessna pilots being called pilots. I think everybody’s going to know if you paid to be a passenger on a five-minute suborbital flight or if you’re the commander of an interplanetary space vehicle. Those are two different things.”

What to know about Blue Origin flight

The New Shepard rocket carrying six celebrities is set to launch at 7 pm IST Monday from Launch Site One on Corn Ranch, a private ranch in rural West Texas. The rocket is a 59-foot-tall suborbital flight, which operates without a pilot.

Apart from Perry , Sánchez and King, the other three crew members include Amanda Nguyen, a civil rights activist and the first Vietnamese woman to fly to space; film producer Kerianne Flynn; and entrepreneur and former Nasa rocket scientist Aisha Bowe.

“I am feeling so grateful and grounded and honoured to be invited and included with this incredible group of women,” Perry said about the space flight, as per Associated Press.

The spaceflight will last around 11 minutes. As per USA Today, the crew capsule will detach from the rocket three minutes after launch. In the fourth minute of liftoff, the capsule will reach apogee – the flight point farthest from Earth.

The passengers on the Blue Origin capsule will experience weightlessness for about three minutes when the flight reaches apogee. The capsule will then descend and land by parachute close to the launch site.

While this flight has been billed as the first all-female crew, it is not technically so. In 1963, the Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova flew a solo mission to space.

So far, Blue Origin has flown 30 missions, 10 of which took 52 people to the edge of space.

The all-women crew flight is high stakes for Blue Origin which is engaged in a competition with Space X over commercial space launch. Elon Musk’s company has reported 469 launches of its Falcon 9 rocket family.

With inputs from agencies