By Joey Roulette
WASHINGTON, Jan 30 (Reuters) – The space tourism rocket that blasted celebrities like Katy Perry and William Shatner to space is shuttering operations, at least for two years, Blue Origin said on Friday, winding down the company’s centerpiece space tourism program to sharpen its focus on building a moon lander for NASA.
Blue Origin, owned by billionaire Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, will “pause its New Shepard flights and shift resources to further accelerate development of the company’s human lunar capabilities,” the company said in a statement.
Standing 60 feet tall, the reusable New Shepard rocket, with its gumdrop-shaped crew capsule on top, has launched dozens of paying passengers and research experiments from Texas across 38 brief, suborbital flights to the edge of space since 2021.
Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp announced the decision internally to employees on Friday in an email that began, “I have some significant news to share with you,” according to a copy seen by Reuters.
“New Shepard has achieved great success and will forever be our first step,” Limp said, adding “the decision to pause is not one that I take lightly.”
With its debut launch in 2015, New Shepard was Blue Origin’s first rocket, designed to launch some 70 miles high and return to land vertically on a slab of concrete.
That landing technique would later help Blue Origin develop New Glenn, its heavy-lift orbital-class rocket that rivals launchers from Elon Musk’s SpaceX and lands in a similar vertical fashion after boosting a payload to orbit.
“We will redirect our people and resources toward further acceleration of our human lunar capabilities inclusive of New Glenn,” Limp said in the email.
The New Shepard decision came as a surprise to some Blue Origin employees, and it is widely seen as a cancellation of the program, company staff told Reuters, speaking anonymously.
Blue Origin has a $3.6 billion contract with NASA that helps fund development of Blue Moon, a lunar lander that is on deck to send U.S. astronauts to the lunar surface later this decade, alongside SpaceX’s Starship lander.
(Reporting by Joey Roulette; Editing by David Gregorio)
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