Blue Origin's tourist rocket is heading for a long timeout while Jeff Bezos' space company shoots for the moon. The company said Friday it will stop flying its New Shepard suborbital rocket for "at least two years" to shift engineers and resources to NASA's Artemis program, which aims to return astronauts to the lunar surface, the New York Times reports. New Shepard, which offers a brief up-and-down hop past the 62-mile mark often used as the edge of space, has flown 38 times from West Texas and carried 98 paying passengers, including Bezos himself, William Shatner, Michael Strahan, Katy Perry, and pioneering would-be astronauts Wally Funk and Edward Dwight.
The pause comes just days after a six-passenger flight in which a senior executive publicly talked up New Shepard's future, and despite a multiyear backlog of customers. But the economics are stark: even at a rough estimate of $1 million a seat, the rocket's lifetime passenger revenue wouldn't crack $100 million, a rounding error next to NASA's $3.4 billion contract for Blue Origin's Artemis lunar landers. NASA, facing delays with SpaceX's Starship lander, has asked both companies to explore ways to speed up work for the Artemis III mission, which the White House wants to launch by the end of 2028.
- New Shepard never reached orbit and was pitched as a reusable, suborbital ride offering a few minutes of weightlessness, part of a space-tourism race with Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic, which has also paused flights while it builds a new generation of vehicles.
- Along the way, New Shepard provided technical stepping stones: its engine has been adapted for the second stage of the much larger New Glenn rocket, and its booster-landing techniques helped Blue Origin stick a New Glenn touchdown on a barge after launching a NASA science mission to Mars.
- Eric Berger, senior space editor at Ars Technica, predicts that the "pause" will be permanent. The move may "inconvenience a few dozen very rich people waiting their turn to go into space on New Shepard, but more broadly, it is a win for the US space industry," he writes, noting that Blue Origin has been "criticized for trying to do too many things at once, resulting in all of its programs moving too slowly."
- Bloomberg reports that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth visited the Blue Origin launch complex in Cape Canaveral on Monday and predicted that the company would "do a lot of winning." He criticized defense contractors for "vendor-locked, over-budget, behind-schedule contracts," but added: "None of those things happened here, by the way—you guys are under budget and ahead of schedule."
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