During most of its two decades of existence, Blue Origin was like Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory in Roald Dahl’s children’s book.
It was a rocket business founded by Jeffrey P. Bezos, the billionaire who created Amazon. So much was known. What the company actually did was shrouded in mystery.
“But everyone wanted to come in,” laughs Carissa Christensen, founder and CEO of Bryce Space and Technology, an aerospace consulting firm.
Mr. Bezos announced on Tuesday that he will step down as CEO of Amazon and become CEO this summer. In his letter to Amazon employees, he said he wants to spend time and energy on other passions and mentions Blue Origin among them.
The coming years for Blue Origin promise to be busy – flying tourists with short suborbital hunting, launching satellites on a new rocket and developing a lunar lander for NASA.
Does this mean that Mr. Bezos will take on a bigger daily role at his rocket company?
“If Jeff would prefer to spend more time with Blue Origin during the next phase of his career, it would be a very good thing for Blue,” said Rob Meyerson, who was president of Blue Origin from 2003 to 2017. ‘, great operational expertise and great mission passion for the company. ”
Mr. Meyerson noted that Bezos’ other ventures include the Bezos Earth Fund, which last year awarded a $ 100 million grant to the Environmental Defense Fund to build and operate a methane-tracking satellite. Amazon, where Mr. Bezos will continue to be involved in the development of Project Kuiper, a constellation of satellites to send Internet service to Earth.
“It is clear that space will be a prominent theme,” he said. Meyerson said.
Mr. Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000 – two years before Elon Musk started the Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, better known as SpaceX.
But although Mr. Musk and SpaceX have already built a thriving business – to launch satellites and NASA astronauts and develop a large rocket called Starship intended to take humans to Mars one day – Blue Origin appears to be lagging behind.
In the early days, the company only occasionally offered drops of news. Reporters would call Blue Origin’s PR firm to get an opportunity that ‘refused to comment’.
In November 2006, a gum drop-shaped test vessel with a modest 285 feet took off and then gently returned to the ground at a test site in West Texas. Mr. Bezos reported the success in a blog post on the Blue Origin website – one and a half months later.
There were no other updates for four and a half years before Mr. Bezos admitted that a test vehicle crashed, but only after The Wall Street Journal reported the failure.
Over the years, Blue Origin has become less mysterious. Five years ago, Mr. Bezos welcomes a group of reporters for a tour of the company’s headquarters in Kent, Washington, a few miles south of Seattle. During lunch, he happily answered questions. “It’s my total pleasure,” he said. “I hope you can feel that I like this.”
Since then, Blue Origin has grown rapidly. It has a NASA contract for the development of a lander that astronauts can take to the moon in a few years. It sells rocket engines to another rocket company, United Launch Alliance. It asks customers to fly scientific experiments on New Shepard, a suborbital spacecraft.
But it has been modest so far. Blue Origin has not yet started selling New Shepard’s primary business – taking tourists on short trips to the edge of space – or even had people on board one of the test flights so far.
New Glenn, a larger rocket that will compete with SpaceX’s Falcon 9 workhorse, will only take off on its first flight at least later this year.
“They have big plans, but they have not yet launched any people on board any of their vessels,” said Laura Seward Forczyk, owner of Astralytical, a space consulting firm.
Mr. Musk and Mr. Bezos often haunted their rockets and whether people should aim for Mars – the ultimate destination of Mr. Musk or free-floating colonies must build like Mr. Bezos this proposal.
In an interview with Maureen Dowd last year, Mr. Musk faintly swung praise for mr. Bezos and Blue Origin: ‘The pace of progress is too slow and the amount of years he has left is not enough, but I’m still glad he’s doing what he’s doing with Blue Origin. ”
This does not necessarily mean that Blue Origin is far behind.
Mr. During his tour with reporters in 2016, Bezos pointed to an image in the central area of the headquarters. It showed two turtles holding an hourglass and looking at the cosmos. Below was Blue Origin’s motto: Gradatim ferociter, which is Latin for ‘step by step, cruel’.
Blue Origin may hope to be the turtle of the fable, where slowly and steadily the winning rabbit finally wins. Mr. Bezos’ wealth – he sold billions of dollars in Amazon shares to help fund Blue Origin – enabled Blue Origin to pursue a methodical long-term plan without earning much revenue in the short term.
Mr. Bezos spoke in more detail about a future where millions of people live and work in space. The purpose of Blue Origin, according to him, is to help people get there.
“We’re going to build a road to space,” Bezos said during a 2019 presentation when he unveiled a design for a lunar lander. “And then incredible things will happen.”
Blue Origin now has a rocket engine factory in Huntsville, Ala., And large facilities just outside NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida for the assembly of the New Glenn rockets.
In 2016, Mr. Bezos said he spent one day a week at Blue Origin. Although he passed as an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering and computer science at Princeton, Mr. Bezos allowed his engineers to talk to reporters about the technical aspects of the Blue Origin spacecraft.
On the other hand, Mr. Musk, with the title of chief engineer, is very involved in engineering details at SpaceX, although Gwynne Shotwell, the president and chief operating officer, handles many of the company’s daily details.
So as Blue Origin shifts from research and development to a pursuit of revenue and profits, now may be an ideal time to bring in someone with Amazon’s business successes.
“He’s a business person who knows how to make money,” she said. Christensen said. “Maybe it’s the moment in time that it’s just too tempting to stay away.”
She added: ‘Amazon has been like no other company before. If Jeff Bezos is really going to spend more time on Blue, I wonder if it’s going to be like no other launch venture before that. ”