Blue Origin has reportedly hit the pause on its New Shepard flights (commercial flights), and honestly, it is a massive shift for the company. The company (owned by Jeff Bezos, owner and founder of Amazon) says that this break frees up people and resources so they can push harder on building their human lunar systems.
NASA to get astronauts back on the Moon
Currently, they are teamed up with NASA to get astronauts back on the Moon by using their Blue Origin lander.
Robotic test flight for Blue Origin
There’s a robotic test flight for Blue Origin coming later this year. If all goes well, astronauts will ride it to the lunar surface around 2029 on the Artemis 5 mission. This fits right in with NASA’s bigger plan to set up a lasting human presence on the Moon.
New Shepard rockets- Famous space tourism flights
Of course, pausing New Shepard means Blue Origin’s famous space tourism flights are on hold. Since they started, New Shepard rockets have flown 38 times—17 with people onboard—sending 98 passengers past the Kármán line and into space.
Each flight only lasts about 10 or 12 minutes, but for those few minutes, people float in zero gravity and look down at Earth from the edge of space. Not a bad way to spend your morning.
It’s not just about tourists, either. New Shepard carried hundreds of science experiments and commercial payloads, giving researchers a chance to try things out in microgravity. Since its first launch back in 2015, it has helped open the door to commercial spaceflight for regular people.
Blue Origin upgrade
Now, with New Shepard grounded for a while, Blue Origin is clearly pivoting. It’s moving away from quick, suborbital trips for tourists and aiming for the bigger prize: building the infrastructure for deep-space exploration and getting humans back on the Moon for good.