If heading up to space was on your bucket list, you might have to wait a little while longer. Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin has paused its space tourism program, dubbed New Shepard, to focus on accelerating the development of the company’s human lunar capabilities.
The space exploration company now says it’s committed to returning to the Moon and eventually establishing a permanent, sustained lunar presence. The space tourism pause is set to last no less than two years.
New Shepard is a reusable spaceflight system that the company says has flown 38 times and carried 98 humans above the Kármán line—which divides Earth from space—to date. Though the program has launched over 200 scientific and research payloads from students, academia, research organizations, and NASA, it’s mainly hit the headlines for launching celebrities like pop star Katy Perry into space in 2024 as part of an all-female mission, or Star Trek’s William Shatner in 2021.
Blue Origin has been extremely open about its plans to get the US back on the Moon, and is currently competing with Elon Musk’s SpaceX for key contracts that form part of NASA’s Artemis program.
In October last year, NASA said it reopened the contract, previously held by Musk’s firm, to build a crewed lunar lander for Artemis III, which is set to return American astronauts to the Moon’s surface for the first time since 1972—a mission President Trump has targeted for 2028.
In November, Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp said it was willing to “move heaven and Earth” to get NASA to the lunar surface before the Chinese, at a press conference reported by Ars Technica.
Aside from aiding NASA’s return to the Moon, Blue Origin has several other ambitious projects in the pipeline to focus on. Earlier this month, the company introduced TeraWave, a new satellite internet system which broadly competes with Elon Musk’s Starlink. Though unlike Starlink, it seems to be targeting mainly military and government buyers, aiming at just 100,000 customers, as opposed to Starlink’s nine million.
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Blue Origin’s tourism pause has put would-be amateur astronauts in a difficult position. Phil Smith, a space industry analyst for BryceTech, told the Houston Chronicle this means there are “effectively zero” companies offering space tourism until at least late 2026. This is when Virgin Galactic is set to renew its tourism operations after pausing them in 2024 to build new craft.
“Orbital tourism opportunities of course remain an option using SpaceX Dragons, but they’re prohibitively expensive,” he told the newspaper.
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