Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin on Friday said it was “pausing” flights of its New Shepard rocket for at least two years, effectively cancelling the company’s centerpiece space tourism vehicle to focus instead on efforts to build a moon lander for NASA.
Blue Origin 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 has launched dozens of paying passengers and research experiments from Texas across 38 brief, suborbital flights to the edge of space since 2021.
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.
