Er, why on earth was Katy Perry chosen to go on a trip to outer space?!

Uh, so Katy Perry is going to space today. At 2:30pm BST, she’ll be blasting off into the sky in Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin rocket. The voyage is expected to last approximately 11 minutes. I really hope she sings E.T. Here’s the real reason why Katy Perry was actually picked to go on a trip to space (despite not being as astronaut or anything).

Katy Perry is heading into space as part of Jeff Bezos’s space tourism programme Blue Origin. The self-driving rocket New Shepherd will have an all-female crew. This is apparently the first time a rocket has only had women on since the astronaut Valentina Tereshkova went into space by herself in 1963. Jeff Bezos’s fiancée Lauren Sánchez was in charge of picking the crew. Apparently she and Jeff Bezos wanted to run an all-female voyage to space in order to encourage more girls to become astronauts. She chose women for the trip who she considered very good at inspiring people.

Lauren Sánchez told Elle: “All of these women are storytellers in their own right. They’re going to go up to space and be able to spread what they felt in different ways.”

The other members of the crew are the rocket scientist Aisha Bowe, the broadcast journalist Gayle King, the filmmaker Kerianne Flynn, and the civil rights activist Amanda Nguyen.

Katy Perry appears to be very excited about her trip to space. The singer has been preparing for the big outing for quite some time. She told Elle that she hopes to inspire her four-year-old daughter Daisy, and “make space and science glam”.

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She said: “Space is going to finally be glam. Let me tell you something. If I could take glam up with me, I would do that. We are going to put the ‘ass’ in astronaut.”

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Featured images via Katy Perry’s Instagram.