Blue Origin is pausing its space tourist flights to work on lunar landers for NASA

Blue Origin plans to focus on developing its human lunar capabilities and therefore will not send tourists into space for at least the next two years. This means we won’t see any New Shepard launches for a while. Blue Origin is one of the companies chosen by NASA to develop human landing systems for its Artemis program, alongside SpaceX. Specifically, it will operate on the Artemis III and Artemis V mission landers.

The company was initially contracted to build the human landing system that would transfer astronauts from NASA’s Gateway Station to the moon’s South Pole region for the Artemis V mission. But last year, NASA asked Blue Origin to design an alternative lander for Artemis III after SpaceX experienced delays due to failed Starship tests. Artemis III is expected to be the program’s first crewed moon landing mission, and the Trump administration wants it to happen before the end of the president’s term.

New Shepard takes tourists into suborbital space, where they experience a few minutes of weightlessness before the spacecraft returns to Earth. Jeff Bezos was one of the passengers on New Shepard’s first sightseeing flight in 2021. Since then, he has flown and landed 37 more times and carried 98 passengers to the Karman Line, including Katy Perry and William Shatner.