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.
The reusable rocket booster uses its fins to guide itself toward a landing pad, firing its engine for a soft landing.
The most recent flight, with six passengers, occurred last week. Afterward, Phil Joyce, a senior vice president at Blue Origin in charge of New Shepard, gave no indication of an upcoming hiatus.
“As we enter 2026, we’re focused on continuing to deliver transformational experiences for our customers through the proven capability and reliability of New Shepard,” Mr. Joyce said in a statement.
Blue Origin said it had a backlog stretching several years of customers wanting a seat on New Shepard.
The company, founded by Mr. Bezos in 2000, has a NASA contract to provide landers to take astronauts to the lunar system as part of the agency’s Artemis program. Originally, the first Blue Origin lander was to be used for the Artemis V mission, which would most likely not launch until the 2030s.
However, SpaceX, which is developing a version of its giant Starship spacecraft as the lander for Artemis III and Artemis IV, has encountered delays, and NASA has requested that both SpaceX and Blue Origin work on ideas that could speed the development of a lander for Artemis III.
“We are absolutely moving forward with both acceleration paths in parallel,” Jared Isaacman, the NASA administrator, said in an interview this week. “We need to do everything we can to help them.”
President Trump wants Artemis III to launch by the end of 2028, before his presidency ends.
The revenue from New Shepard is minuscule compared with NASA’s $3.4 billion contract for Blue Origin’s Artemis landers. The company never announced a price for riding on New Shepard, which provides a few minutes of free fall, but if the average ticket cost $1 million, the 98 passengers to date would have brought in less than $100 million.
Flights carrying experiments earned some additional revenue. During one of these launches in 2022, the rocket’s booster stage failed, but an emergency escape system carried the capsule to safety.
Both Blue Origin’s rocket and Virgin Galactic’s space plane aimed to create a market for suborbital space tourism. But neither company was able to accelerate the pace of launches, and people on their waiting lists are stuck on the ground for now
In 2024, Virgin Galactic paused flights of its one operational space plane so that it could focus on the manufacturing of new generation of vehicles that outwardly look identical but are designed to fly more frequently and carry six passengers instead of four. Virgin Galactic is looking to start operations of its new space planes this year.
New Shepard did provide some key experience and technology for Blue Origin. A variation of New Shepard’s rocket engine is used for the second stage of Blue Origin’s much larger New Glenn rocket.
The experience of landing New Shepard boosters also helped the company successfully land the New Glenn booster on a floating barge last year on just the second try, after it launched a small NASA science mission toward Mars.
Kenneth Chang, a science reporter at The Times, covers NASA and the solar system, and research closer to Earth.
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