New Shepard

New Shepard is listed here as flying, and that is the least wrong of the available labels rather than a true one. It last flew on 22 January 2026, and on 30 January Blue Origin announced it would stand down for no less than two years to move people onto lunar lander work. It has not been retired and it has not been cancelled. It has simply stopped.

Nineteen metres tall, 3.81 metres across, one engine making 490 kilonewtons, a single stage, and a capsule that comes down under parachutes while the booster lands on its legs. Blue Origin publishes no dimensions of its own and the height is not fully settled between sources. The low orbit payload here is zero, which is the correct entry rather than a gap: it tops out just above the hundred kilometre line and comes straight back down.

The distinction blurred in most of the coverage is energy, not altitude. Getting to a hundred kilometres takes a small fraction of the energy required to stay there, because orbit is about going sideways at nearly eight kilometres a second. A New Shepard passenger crosses the same line as an astronaut and does a few percent of the work.

None of which makes it fake. Thirty-eight flights, thirty-seven of them successful, ninety-eight people carried above the Karman line, and roughly 99 percent of the vehicle's dry mass reused between flights by the operator's own accounting. Its one failure, in September 2022, was uncrewed and ended with the escape system pulling the capsule clear exactly as designed.

The pause is the most honest thing anyone at Blue Origin has said about where the value sits. A company that owns both a tourist ride and a Moon contract looked at its own people and chose the contract, and the ride stopped.