(Image credit: Blue Origin)
Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin plans to launch six people to suborbital space are on hold due to another weather delay.
The mission — known as NS-33, because it will be the 33rd overall flight of the company’s New Shepard vehicle — was originally scheduled to lift off from Blue Origin’s West Texas site on Saturday (June 21) morning. But Mother Nature didn’t cooperate; high winds forced a scrub.
The launch was then targeted for Sunday at 8:30 a.m. EDT (1230 GMT; 7:30 a.m. local Texas time). But the weather didn’t cooperate again.
“Today’s NS-33 launch attempt is scrubbed due to weather. We’re assessing our next launch opportunity,” read a Blue Origin update on social media.
New Shepard is an autonomous, fully reusable vehicle that consists of a first-stage booster and a crew capsule. Its flights last 10 to 12 minutes from liftoff to capsule touchdown; passengers get to experience a few minutes of weightlessness and see Earth against the blackness of space.
The people going up on the NS-33 mission are Allie and Carl Kuehner, a husband and wife who are both into conservation and exploration; philanthropist and beekeeper Leland Larson; entrepreneur Freddie Rescigno, Jr.; lawyer and author Owolabi Salis; and retired attorney Jim Sitkin.
You can learn more about each of them in our NS-33 crew reveal story.
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— Blue Origin launches Michael Strahan and crew of 5 on record-setting suborbital spaceflight
NS-33 will be Blue Origin’s 13th human spaceflight mission overall and its fourth of 2025 so far. (Most of the company’s flights have been uncrewed research missions.)
The company first launched people to the final frontier on July 20, 2021, the 52nd anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. Bezos and his brother Mark went up on that landmark New Shepard flight, along with aviation pioneer Wally Funk and Dutch student Oliver Daemen.
Editor’s note: This story was updated at 8:45 a.m. ET on June 22 with the news of the second weather delay.
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