Blue Origin suspends tourist flights to look at the moon

Jeff Bezos’ company Blue Origin is suspending its space missions for “at least two years” to use all of its resources for an upcoming trip to the moon, the company announced Friday.

The ruling temporarily halts a program that Blue Origin has been using to launch humans across the Kármán line, the known boundary of space. the last five years.

Blue Origin made the announcement a few weeks ahead of schedule the third launch of its New Glenn mega-rocketwhich is expected at the end of February. The company previously said it would use the third launch of New Glenn to send its robotic spacecraft to the moon, but the spacecraft is still being tested at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Texas.

Since taking office, President Donald Trump has pushed NASA to send astronauts back to the moon by the end of his second term. This has opened the way for companies other than SpaceX to compete for these services.

“This proposal demonstrates Blue Origin’s commitment to the nation’s mission of returning to the Moon and reestablishing a permanent lunar presence,” the company wrote Friday.

Blue Origin first launched the New Shepard rocket more than a decade ago, and it became the first rocket to go into space. Return safely to Earth. Unlike SpaceX’s Falcon 9, even the New Shepard rocket is not designed to reach Earth orbit. Its use is limited to commercial flights, which allow passengers about four minutes to reduce weight in the Blue Origin space capsule, and scientific missions.

The company said Friday that New Shepard has flown 38 times and carried 98 people into space, along with more than 200 scientific and research investments.

The New Shepard program was already canceled in 2022 after that one of the company’s support systems exploded inside the plane. There were no passengers on board, and the capsule was safely ejected from the booster. But New Shepard has been delayed until the end of 2023 when Blue Origin worked to identify and correct the cause.