Bezos’ Blue Origin Readies Return to Space After More Than a Year

Blue Origin, which the billionaire entrepreneur founded more than two decades ago, plans to fly more than 30 research and scientific experiments to space on an uncrewed New Shepard vehicle as soon as 9:30 a.m. ET Monday.

A successful mission could help the company resume carrying passengers. A failure last year during an uncrewed mission stalled operations for its suborbital launch business, one of the company’s flagship divisions.

Blue Origin’s New Shepard uses a reusable booster to blast a capsule more than 62 miles up, where it flies for a few minutes before returning to Earth under parachutes. The company in recent years has conducted six human space flights with the vehicle, including trips featuring actor William Shatner and Good Morning America anchor Michael Strahan.

The company hasn’t operated New Shepard since September of last year, when an engine nozzle failed during an uncrewed research launch. The booster used during that operation was destroyed. No one was hurt during the incident, and Blue Origin said the capsule’s escape system worked.

Blue Origin spent months investigating what happened, as required by the Federal Aviation Administration. The air-safety regulator approved the company’s analysis of the episode, which called for redesigning nozzle components, more than two months ago.

Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic, competitors in offering private, suborbital flights, made a splash in the summer of 2021 when Bezos and Richard Branson took separate, highly publicized trips to space using their companies’ respective vehicles.

While human space flight over the decades has been almost entirely the realm of government agencies, more private companies have been targeting it as a business, despite questions about the size of the market.

Tickets are costly—Virgin Galactic has been charging $450,000 a seat for private astronauts—limiting the pool of potential customers. KeyBanc estimated in a January report about Virgin Galactic that there are around 25 million wealthy people this year globally that the company could target as customers.

Blue Origin’s planned flight Monday would mark one of its first major operations since Dave Limp, a longtime Amazon.com executive, took over as chief executive from Bob Smith, who joined the company in 2017 from Honeywell Aerospace.

In a June interview, Smith said New Shepard, which can carry tourists, researchers and scientific equipment, had a robust book of business. “We have a very, very full manifest on New Shepard," he said then. Bezos said in 2021 that privately held Blue Origin was approaching $100 million in New Shepard sales.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX is also working on private-astronaut flights, and in 2021 conducted a three-day orbital trip for technology entrepreneur Jared Isaacman and three others. Isaacman funded that operation, and has paid for up to three additional space flights with the company. Those missions, called Polaris, would include the first-ever private-astronaut spacewalk and, later on, a flight on Starship, the powerful vehicle that SpaceX is developing.

SpaceX plans to one day use Starship for other private missions as well, including one funded by the Japanese entrepreneur Yusaku Maezawa. The company sold seats on a future Starship operation to Dennis Tito, the investor who traveled to the International Space Station on a Russian space vehicle more than 20 years ago, and his wife.

Houston-based Axiom Space has struck agreements with NASA to transport private and government astronauts to the space station as the company develops its own orbiting facility. Axiom sells seats and organizes training, using SpaceX to transport passengers.

Those who paid to visit the International Space Station on Axiom’s first private mission included investors from Israel and the U.S. Earlier this year, it took up two astronauts representing Saudi Arabia and a fiber-optic cable entrepreneur.

Axiom is scheduled to have SpaceX fly government astronauts, including the first Turkish citizen to visit space, on its next mission to the station in January.

Write to Micah Maidenberg at micah.maidenberg@wsj.com