Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin was scheduled to launch six people to suborbital space on Saturday (June 21), but the weather did not cooperate.
"We’re scrubbing today’s NS-33 launch due to persistent high winds at Launch Site One. We’re egressing the astronauts and will assess our next launch opportunity," the company posted on social media.
The mission — known as NS-33, because it will be the 33rd overall flight of the company's New Shepard vehicle — was scheduled to lift off from Blue Origin's West Texas site on Saturday during a window that opened at 8:30 a.m. EDT (1230 GMT; 7:30 a.m. local Texas time).
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.
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.
