Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin Delays Space Tourism Launch
The New Shepard rocket was scheduled to lift off from West Texas around 11 am New York time in a mission slated to include the first wheelchair user to reach space and one of SpaceX’s first engineers.
Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin delayed the launch of a crew of six on a suborbital joyride Thursday, citing an unspecified issue after earlier delays for high winds.
The New Shepard rocket was scheduled to lift off from West Texas around 11 a.m. New York time in a mission slated to include the first wheelchair user to reach space and one of SpaceX’s first engineers.
“We are standing down from today’s NS-37 mission after the launch team observed an issue with our built-in checks prior to the flight,” Blue Origin said in a social media post. “We are assessing our next opportunity for launch.”
The passengers for Thursday’s mission included Michaela Benthaus, who was injured during a mountain biking accident in 2018 and is an aerospace engineer at the European Space Agency. Hans Koenigsmann worked at SpaceX for two decades, most recently as the company’s vice president of avionics, before retiring in 2021.
The launch will be the 16th human spaceflight for Bezos’ tourism company using New Shepard, a small craft built to send people on short trips to the edge of space, as well as to conduct research missions.
While Blue Origin does not disclose its price for a seat on one of its tourism flights, rival space tourism company Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc. charges around $600,000 for a similar experience.
In April, pop star Katy Perry, Bezos’ fiancee Lauren Sánchez and CBS News host Gayle King took the flight, becoming part of the first all-female crew to go to space in more than 60 years.
The company also operates its much larger, heavy-lift New Glenn rocket, which is capable of delivering spacecraft and satellites to orbit and beyond.
Blue Origin completed a successful second flight of New Glenn in November, in which the rocket deployed two Mars-bound NASA spacecraft and nailed the landing of its reusable booster on a barge in the Atlantic.
