to join the new race to the Moon. Billionaire Jeff Bezos’ space company announced this Friday that it will pause “for at least two years” the suborbital trips of its New Shepard rocket, with which millionaires and celebrities have been entering space since In a statement, the company highlights that it will allocate the resources of this tourism initiative
The announcement has caused surprise in the space sector, which considers the largest tourism initiative to date definitively cancelled. The New Shepard rocket has flown 38 times and in its 14 flights manned It has led 98 people to overcome the Kárman line – which marks the border with space, 100 kilometers above the Earth’s surface. founder of Civitatis, who paid a million-dollar ticket (undisclosed) to go up and down in a space capsule and experience three minutes of weightlessness.
In February 2025, it was the adventurer and television presenter Jesús Calleja who participated in that media experience that reopened the debate on whether these suborbital flights without any technical activity, and after minimal training, could grant their participants the category of astronauts.
It was in April of that same year, with its “women-only” space flight — which Blue Origin even compared to the exploits of Valentina Tereshkova, the first astronaut in history. Participating in that flight were, among others, the singer Katy Perry and the reporter Lauren Sánchez, then fiancée of Jeff Bezos.
Target: the Moon
In the statement with which Blue Origin cancels the tourist space flights planned for the coming months, Bezos’ company emphasizes its commitment to the US objective “of returning to the Moon and establishing a permanent and sustained presence there.” Its first step will be to launch its Blue Moon lunar lander, with which it planned to deploy a robotic probe on the Moon in early 2026 – the third mission of its New Glenn superrocket – to put a gigantic satellite into orbit to bring internet to mobile phones and that
This new delay in the development of Blue Moon could justify Bezos’ decision to allocate the resources of his space tourism initiative to his lunar program. And it also raises the question of whether NASA would be considering turning to Blue Origin to land the first astronauts on the lunar surface since 1972. That role, in principle, corresponds to Elon Musk’s company SpaceX, but its gigantic Starship space shuttle is not yet ready. It has not even managed to reach Earth orbit; something essential for any space mission, and that
