The Silicon Graybeard

In the World of the High Tech Redneck, the Graybeard is the old guy who earned his gray by making all the mistakes, and tries to keep the young 'uns from repeating them. Silicon Graybeard is my term for an old hardware engineer; a circuit designer. The focus of this blog is on doing things, from radio to home machine shops and making all kinds of things, along with comments from a retired radio engineer, that run from tech, science or space news to economics; from firearms to world events.

Friday, January 30, 2026

Blue Origin pauses - or ends - their suborbital tourism flights

Let me rephrase that a little. Blue Origin officially “paused” its New Shepard program for the next two years, but that's being interpreted as a move that likely signals a permanent end to the suborbital space tourism initiative.

The small rocket and capsule have been flying since April 2015 and have combined to make 38 launches, all but one of which were successful, and 36 landings. In its existence, the New Shepard program flew 98 people to space, however briefly, and launched more than 200 scientific and research payloads into the microgravity environment.

I'd wager that, like me, the early New Shepard flights were the first time you had heard of Blue Origin and the first time you had seen boosters land for reuse.

So why is this over 25 year-old company, which has been flying these missions for over a decade, ending this flagship program? They're feeling the pressure to perform for the moon landing program, Artemis, and they don't want anything to distract that effort.

“We will redirect our people and resources toward further acceleration of our human lunar capabilities inclusive of New Glenn,” wrote the company’s chief executive, Dave Limp, in an internal email on Friday afternoon. “We have an extraordinary opportunity to be a part of our nation’s goal of returning to the Moon and establishing a permanent, sustained lunar presence.”

The cancellation came, generally, as a surprise to Blue Origin employees. The company flew its most recent mission eight days ago, launching six people into space. Moreover, the company has four new boosters in various stages of development as well as two new capsules under construction. Blue Origin has been selling human flights for more than a year and is still commanding a per-seat price of approximately $1 million based on recent sales. It was talking about expansion to new spaceports in September.

There's also the not-so-small consideration that even with price around $1 million per seat, there are persistent reports the costs per mission are more than the price of admission can bring in. There's at least 500 people on the staff at Blue Origin who work on New Shepard flight. They're looking for people for positions both on New Glenn and their other big ticket, NASA programs.

Look, Blue has gotten lots of criticism for how long it has taken to get New Glenn flying. This is a good way to get experienced employees with a big head start onto those big programs. The only cost is that people like Katy Perry will have to wait longer to get into space. If they actually start flying New Shepard again.