The small, stubby New Shepard rocket from the rocket company started by Jeff Bezos has sent celebrities like William Shatner, Michael Strahan and Katy Perry to the edge of space.
Now, it won’t be going anywhere for a while.
The company, Blue Origin, announced on Friday that it was pausing launches of New Shepard for at least two years so that it could concentrate on efforts needed for NASA’s upcoming missions to send astronauts back to the moon.
The first flight of New Shepard with people aboard, in 2021, garnered wide press attention because one of the four passengers on that flight was Mr. Bezos. Two weeks earlier, another billionaire, Richard Branson, similarly flew to the edge of space on a space plane built by his space company, Virgin Galactic.
New Shepard has flown 38 times, lifting off from Blue Origin’s site in West Texas. Other passengers were less famous but included a couple of historical figures from the early space age: Wally Funk, a woman who participated in astronaut training in the 1960s, and Edward Dwight, a Black test pilot who was considered but not selected as an astronaut.
The rocket does not reach orbit like Blue Origin’s much larger New Glenn vehicle. Instead, it is more like an up-and-down roller-coaster ride. A capsule on top of the rocket, usually carrying people or a payload of scientific experiments, rises above an altitude of 62 miles, often considered the boundary of outer space. It then descends under a parachute for a landing.
The company said it had carried 98 passengers — 92 individuals, some of them repeat fliers — who now have the bragging rights to call themselves astronauts.
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Jeff Bezos’s Rocket Company Blue Origin Pauses Space Tourism to Focus on the Moon
