Blue Origin shutters New Shepard rocket program
The space tourism rocket, which launched celebrities such as Katy Perry and William Shatner into space, has stopped operations for at least two years.
Blue Origin says it is ending the company’s flagship space tourism program to sharpen its focus on building a lunar lander for NASA.
Blue Origin, owned by billionaire Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, said in a statement Friday that it will “pause New Shepard flights and shift resources to further accelerate the development of the company’s human lunar capabilities.”
The 60-foot-tall reusable New Shepard rocket, with its gumdrop-shaped crew capsule on top, has launched dozens of paying passengers and research experiments over 38 short, suborbital flights from Texas to the edge of space since 2021.
Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp announced the decision in an email to employees internally on Friday that began, “I have some important news to share with you,” according to a copy seen by Reuters.
“New Shepard has been a huge success and will forever be our first step,” Limp said, adding that “the decision to pause is not one I take lightly.”
With its first launch in 2015, New Shepard was Blue Origin’s first rocket designed to launch to an altitude of approximately 110 km and land vertically on a concrete slab.
This landing technique will later help Blue Origin develop New Glenn, a heavy-lift orbital-class rocket that rivals Elon Musk’s SpaceX launchers and descends in a similar vertical manner after lifting a payload into orbit.
“We will direct our people and resources to further accelerate our human lunar capabilities, including New Glenn,” Limp said in the email.
The New Shepard decision came as a surprise to some Blue Origin employees and was widely viewed as a cancellation of the program, company staff told Reuters anonymously.
Blue Origin has a US$3.6 billion ($5.2 billion) contract with NASA that helps fund the development of Blue Moon, a lunar lander that is onboard alongside SpaceX’s Starship lander to send US astronauts to the lunar surface later this decade.
