Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin will pause its space tourism flights for “at least two years” to focus all resources on its upcoming mission to the moon, the company announced Friday.
The decision temporarily halts the program that Blue Origin has used for the past five years to fly humans beyond the Kármán Line, the accepted boundary in space.
Blue Origin made the announcement just weeks before the third launch of its New Glenn giant rocket, scheduled for late February. The company previously indicated it intended to use a third Newglen launch to send a robotic lunar lander to the moon, but that rover is still being tested at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Texas.
Since taking office, President Donald Trump has been pressuring NASA to send astronauts back to the moon before the end of his second term. This opens the door for companies other than SpaceX to compete on these missions.
“This decision reflects Blue Origin’s commitment to the national goal of returning to the Moon and establishing a permanent and sustained lunar presence,” the company wrote on Friday.
Blue Origin first flew its New Shepard rocket more than a decade ago, becoming the first rocket to go into space and return safely to Earth. However, unlike SpaceX’s Falcon 9, the New Shepard rocket was not intended to reach Earth orbit. Therefore, its use is limited to space tourism flights, where passengers can be weightless for about four minutes inside Blue Origin’s space capsule, and to scientific missions.
The company announced Friday that New Shepard has flown 38 times, carrying 98 humans into space along with more than 200 scientific and research payloads.
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The New Shepard program was previously suspended in 2022 after one of the company’s boosters exploded in flight. There were no humans in the stool, and the capsule was safely ejected from the booster. However, New Shepard remained grounded until the end of 2023 while Blue Origin worked to identify and fix the cause.
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