Lauren Sanchez’s all-female space flight is about to blast off – and will challenge Elon Musk’s SpaceX

Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin rocket blasts off on Monday, with his fiancee, Katy Perry and three others on board. But is it more than just a stunt?

Jeff Bezos is blasting his bride-to-be Lauren Sánchez and her “guests” to space on Monday – a plan that might, under other circumstances, contain mixed messages.

A crew of six women – Amanda Nguyen, a civil rights activist who will become the first Vietnamese woman to fly to space; the CBS Mornings co-host Gayle King; the pop star Katy Perry; film producer Kerianne Flynn; entrepreneur and former Nasa rocket scientist Aisha Bowe; and Sánchez, a journalist and philanthropist – will blast off on Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket from the company’s launch site, 30 miles north of Van Horn, Texas, on an 11-minute, suborbital flight to the edge of space and back.