Blue Origin won't be launching any more space tourism missions for a while.
Jeff Bezos' aerospace company announced today (Jan. 30) that it's grounding its New Shepard suborbital vehicle for at least two years, so it can focus on sending people much farther afield.
Blue Origin's lunar ambitions are concrete: The company holds a contract to land NASA astronauts on the moon using its Blue Moon spacecraft. If all goes to plan, Blue Moon will do so for the first time on the Artemis 5 mission, which is targeted to launch in 2029.
But Blue Origin could hit the gray dirt much sooner than that: It plans to launch a pathfinder version of Blue Moon on a robotic demonstration mission to the lunar surface later this year.
Artemis 2, the first-ever crewed mission of the Artemis program, could launch on its round-the-moon flight as soon as Feb. 8. Artemis 3 and Artemis 4, the first crewed Artemis flights to the lunar surface, are slated to use SpaceX's Starship vehicle as a lander.
New Shepard, a reusable rocket-capsule combo, launched for the first time in April 2015. It now has 38 total flights under its belt, including 17 crewed missions, which together have carried 98 people to and from suborbital space. (Six people have flown twice, so a total of 92 different individuals have flown on New Shepard.)
New Shepard flew most recently just last week, when it sent six people up on a mission called NS-38.
Passengers get to experience a few minutes of weightlessness and see Earth against the blackness of space during New Shepard flights, each of which lasts 10 to 12 minutes. Blue Origin has not revealed its ticket prices for the vehicle.
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