Blue Origin is pausing its area vacationer flights to work on lunar landers for NASA

Blue Origin plans to put a focus on the event of its human lunar capabilities, so it gained’t be sending vacationers to area for at the least the subsequent two years. Meaning we gained’t be seeing any New Shepard launches for fairly a while. Blue Origin is likely one of the firms NASA selected to develop human touchdown programs for its Artemis program, together with SpaceX. Particularly, it’s going to work on landers for the Artemis III and Artemis V missions.

The corporate was originally contracted to construct the human touchdown system that might switch astronauts from NASA’s Gateway station to the moon’s South Pole area for the Artemis V mission. However final 12 months, NASA requested Blue Origin to design an alternative lander for Artemis III after SpaceX skilled delays as a result of Starship’s failed tests. Artemis III is predicted to be the primary crewed moon touchdown mission of this system, and the Trump administration desires it to occur earlier than the top of the president’s time period.

New Shepard takes vacationers to suborbital area, the place they expertise a couple of minutes of weightlessness earlier than the spacecraft makes its method again to Earth. Jeff Bezos was one of many passengers on New Shepard’s first tourist flight again in 2021. Since then, it has flown and landed 37 extra occasions and carried 98 passengers to the Karman line, together with Katy Perry and William Shatner.