Blue Origin pauses space tourism flights to focus on the moon | TechCrunch

"Jeff Bezos' space company Blue Origin is pausing its space tourism flights for "no less than two years" in order to focus all of its resources on upcoming missions to the moon, the company announced Friday. The decision puts a temporary halt on a program that Blue Origin has been using to fly humans past the Kármán line, the recognized boundary of space, for the last five years."

"Blue Origin first flew the New Shepard rocket more than a decade ago, and it became the first rocket to go to space and safely land back on Earth. Unlike SpaceX's Falcon 9, though, the New Shepard rocket was never intended to reach Earth orbit. Its utility has therefore been limited to space tourism flights, which allow passengers around four minutes of weightlessness in Blue Origin's space capsule, and science missions."

Blue Origin will pause New Shepard suborbital space tourism flights for no less than two years to concentrate resources on upcoming lunar missions and New Glenn activity. The pause suspends flights that provided about four minutes of weightlessness and carried scientific payloads. The third New Glenn launch remains slated for late February, but a planned robotic lunar lander is still undergoing testing at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Texas. New Shepard has flown 38 times, carried 98 humans, and flown over 200 research payloads. The program previously paused in 2022 after a booster explosion; no humans were aboard and the capsule safely ejected.

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