Blue Origin pauses space tourism flights to focus on lunar lander

Blue Origin, the private spaceflight company founded by Jeff Bezos, is suspending the short flights of its suborbital New Shepard spacecraft, which took paying customers to the edge of space and back.

Since its first human launch in July 2021, New Shepard’s space tourism flights have carried 98 people above the Kármán line — the widely-accepted boundary of space about 62 miles above the Earth — and safely back again in a capsule. From launch to landing in west Texas, the missions last about ten minutes.

That first flight carried Bezos, his brother Mark, aviator Wally Funk and 18-year-old Oliver Daemen. Since then, Blue Origin has carried paying customers, along with some celebrity passengers like William Shatner, Katy Perry, Gayle King and Michael Strahan.

The company says the pause, which will last at least two years, will allow Blue Origin to dedicate more time and money to developing its human lunar landing capabilities. NASA awarded Blue Origin a $3.4 billion contract to develop a spacecraft that could take humans to the surface of the moon.

NASA’s Artemis program aims to return humans to the moon for the first time in more than 50 years, and is working with commercial space companies to develop the hardware. Elon Musk’s SpaceX is developing its Starship rocket for the first two human landing missions, and Blue Origin will provide its vehicle for the third.

But before any of those companies can ferry astronauts to the lunar surface, NASA must successfully complete Artemis II, which is taking astronauts on a trip around the moon and back. That mission could launch as early as Sunday, Feb. 8 — although unusually cold temperatures at the Florida launch site this weekend are delaying a critical test ahead of that launch attempt.