Jeff Bezos, free from his daily obligations at Amazon, is expected to increase the heat on his space company Blue Origin as it faces an important year and fierce competition from Elon Musk’s SpaceX, industry sources said.
The 57-year-old Bezos, a lifelong space enthusiast and the second richest person in the world behind Musk, said last week that he was stepping down as CEO of the e-commerce business because he wanted to focus on personal projects.
Blue Origin fell far behind SpaceX with orbital transport, losing SpaceX and United Launch Alliance (ULA) by billions of dollars to US national security contracts starting in 2022. ULA is a joint venture between Boeing Co. and Lockheed Martin Corp.
Now Blue Origin is struggling to win a competition with SpaceX and Dynetics to develop a new lunar lander for NASA’s potentially more expensive billion dollars to allow humans to return to the moon within a few years. Dynetics is owned by Leidos Holdings Inc.
The people said Bezos and other executives saw the need to acquire the lunar lander contract – and its execution – as essential to establishing Blue Origin as a desirable partner for NASA.
With a limited revenue stream, Bezos has liquidated about $ 1 billion annually in Amazon shares to finance Blue, which he says is ‘the most important job I do’ in 2018.
A Blue Origin representative declined to comment, but pointed to comments Bezos made last week when he said he would step down as Amazon CEO.
He told Amazon employees that he would “keep busy with important Amazon initiatives”, but would also spend time on Blue Origin and various “passions” for philanthropy and media.
NASA is expected to win the lunar lander contest by just two companies by the end of April, which will add pressure as Blue Origin encounters problems such as wasting millions of dollars on procurement and technical and manufacturing challenges, the sources said. .
One of the development struggles Blue has faced is getting the lander light and small enough to fit on a commercial rocket, two people said.
However, another source said that Blue has modified its design since the initial contract was awarded last April, and that the current design fits with an additional number of available and future rockets, including Musk’s Falcon Heavy and ULA’s Vulcan.
“He’s going to kick Blue Origin into a higher gear,” said a senior industry source with knowledge of Blue’s operations.
Bezos has already transplanted Amazon’s culture on Blue, enforcing similar ‘leadership principles’ and kicking off meetings by reading documents in silence, sources said.
But a veteran in the industry said Bezos should take on a practical, operational role if he is to rectify a number of issues such as bureaucratic processes, deadlines, high overheads and engineering turnover that emerges according to this source as Blue Origin. seeks to switch from development to production in various programs.
One person familiar with the matter said Bezos did not have the desire to immerse himself completely in the day-to-day operations, and would rather prioritize important initiatives and new efforts.
In his latest Instagram posts, Bezos is seen climbing into a crew capsule wearing cowboy boots, and sitting in his pickup and watching a rocket engine test, which he described as a ‘perfect night!
Bezos versus Musk
os versus Musk
Founded in 2000, Blue Origin was founded in Kent, Washington and has expanded to approximately 3,500 employees with extensive manufacturing and launch facilities in Texas, Florida and Alabama.
The ambitious portfolio includes the sale of tourist trips abroad to space, satellite launch services and the lander – none of which are commercially viable yet.
Recent data shows that Blue has overcome combustion stability issues on its BE-4 rocket engine – another line of business, two sources said. Test engines for ULA’s first Vulcan rocket are expected to arrive in Cape Canaveral, Florida this week, with the first flight engines and booster coming later this spring, one said.
By comparison, Musk’s SpaceX, founded two years after Blue Origin, has launched its Falcon 9 boosters more than 100 times, launched the world’s most powerful operational rocket – Falcon Heavy – three times, and transported astronauts to the International Space Station.
SpaceX said on Thursday that it has 10,000 users on its emerging satellite-based broadband service called Starlink, which Musk said will provide crucial funding to develop its Starship rocket for missions to the moon and eventually Mars.
Blue is also hoping for a steady stream of revenue for its New Glenn rocket with a heavy lift – which could possibly make its debut late this year – from Amazon’s upcoming constellation of about 3,200 satellites called Project Kuiper, sources say.
Amazon aims to have half of the constellation in orbit by 2026, but there is no public timeline for a first launch.
Until now, Bezos has devoted one day a week to Blue Origin, with meetings in the conference room being replaced by video calls in recent months due to the coronavirus pandemic, sources said.