Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp (left) and founder Jeff Bezos look at a New Glenn rocket at the company's LC-36 factory in Florida.
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Dave Limp had just one question for Jeff Bezos when he interviewed last year for the position of CEO of Blue Origin, the billionaire's space company.
“Jeff, is Blue Origin a hobby or a business?” Limp asked.
After 14 years as a senior Amazon Chief Executive Limp told CNBC that he made it clear to Bezos that he had no interest in running Blue Origin if the nearly 25-year-old company was not intended to be a legitimate business.
“I don’t know how to have a hobby,” Limp said, adding, “If it was a hobby, it wouldn’t be right for me.”
But he said Bezos was adamant that Blue Origin needed to be a company.
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Limp admitted that Bezos needed some convincing to move into the space sector. “My first reaction was: This isn’t the right job for me because I’m not an aerospace engineer,” he said. But he decided to take the leap of faith.
“Jeff felt that [Blue Origin] required manufacturing expertise; it took determination; “It takes a little bit of energy,” Limp said.
Limp has been CEO of Blue Origin for nine months now. He took over leadership from previous leadership, which had greatly expanded the company's workforce and infrastructure but had fallen behind for years on several major programs and lost competitions for key government contracts.
CEO Dave Limp, third from left, with Blue Origin employees at the company's New Glenn location in Florida.
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Blue Origin has been flying tourists and researchers on short trips to the edge of space for years, including Bezos himself. And for the past two decades, Bezos has spent billions of dollars each year to build Blue Origin into a space powerhouse. The company's projects range from rockets and spacecraft to space stations and lunar landers.
But in the orbital mission industry, Blue Origin has not yet entered the serious rocket business, as the US launch vehicle market is still dominated by SpaceX, followed by United Launch Alliance. Rocket Lab and Firefly Aerospace.
But the company said it is closer than ever to the long-awaited debut of its New Glenn rocket. At a height of about 320 feet, the launch vehicle is expected to be able to lift up to 45,000 kilograms (or over 99,000 pounds) to low Earth orbit – twice as much as SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9 rocket.
On February 21, 2024, a new Glenn rocket will be at LC-36 for the first time for refueling and testing of mechanical systems.
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Like Falcon 9, New Glenn is partially reusable. Blue Origin aims to return and land the launch engine, the largest and most valuable part of the rocket, to achieve the kind of cost and time savings that SpaceX promises with its rockets.
New Glenn's first launch attempt is scheduled for November. Blue Origin is in the final stages of putting everything together, including conducting a key test fire of the rocket's upper stage last month.
The company originally aimed for the audacious feat of flying NASA's ESCAPADE mission to Mars in New Glenn's debut. But as the launch window became increasingly narrow, the agency postponed ESCAPADE to a later launch. In lieu of the mission, Blue Origin will conduct a demonstration of its Blue Ring spacecraft during New Glenn's first launch.
Cultural change
Company employees stand under a New Glenn rocket during testing in February 2024.
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Headquartered in the Seattle suburb of Kent, Washington, Blue Origin employs more than 10,000 people there and at half a dozen other key locations across the country, including in the industrial hotbeds of Texas, Florida and Alabama. In plain language, Limp said Blue Origin has been “in a sort of research and development phase for a long time,” an aspect of the company's culture that he is trying to change.
“We were very, very good at building shiny factories and very good at building high-fidelity prototypes. And some of these prototypes even flew… but that's not what we want to do to become a world-class manufacturer,” Limp said.
“We need to be able to build a lot,” he added.
But he said he sees a real passion for space among Blue's workforce, calling that passion the foundation of a “missionary culture.” In Limp's view, Amazon's customer-centric principles drive the tech giant's culture – but Amazon doesn't have “the vehement mission that Blue does.”
“People's eyes light up, almost to the limit. They grew up thinking about space, they always wanted to work in the space industry, and here at Blue they are working on space,” Limp said.
Now he's trying to establish Amazon's customer-centric focus as an important part of Blue Origin. While Blue's customers – including NASA, ULA and suborbital astronauts – are significantly different from the consumers Limp previously focused on, his message to Blue's employees is that serving his customers is a top priority.
“Even if the technology is really nice and fun… the focus has to be on the customer,” Limp said.
To further transform Blue's culture, Limp highlighted a number of key leadership additions: Allen Parker as CFO after previous finance leadership roles at Zillow and Amazon; Jennifer Pena-Leanos as chief people officer after leading human resources on Limp's previous Amazon Devices team; Ian Richardson as senior vice president of manufacturing operations after a long stint as SpaceX production manager; and Tim Collins as vice president of global supply chain, having previously led global operations for Flexport and Amazon.
Limp also made a change by moving a larger portion of the company's workforce to the factory.
“You can go into a factory and know when it's running well and when it's not,” he said. “It doesn’t matter how much capital expenditure you make, what kind of machines you have, if you don’t use them properly. It's like having a shiny new car just sitting in the driveway – what fun that is.” ?”
2024 top priorities
A test of a BE-4 engine at Blue Origin's Launch Site One facility in West Texas, August 2, 2019.
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Limp has two main goals for his first year as CEO: getting New Glenn launched and Blue's engine production up and running.
“We can’t get anywhere without engines, and we had to figure out how to build high-speed engines,” Limp said.
Blue Origin's BE-4 engine powers both ULA's New Glenn rocket and Vulcan rocket. The latter requires two engines per takeoff.
With ULA targeting four Vulcan launches this year – two canceled and two remaining – Blue has delivered eight flight-ready BE-4 engines to ULA, as well as seven BE-4 engines for its first New Glenn launch. In the first two Vulcan launches, the BE-4 engines performed as expected.
“We would like that [be delivering] about one engine per week by the end of the year. I'm not sure if we'll make it exactly a week, but it will be less than 10 days… [and] We have to be faster by the end of 2025,” said Limp.
A United Launch Alliance Vulcan Centaur rocket lifts off at 7:25 a.m. Oct. 4, 2024, from Pad 41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Cape Canaveral, Florida.
Paul Hennessy | Anadolu | Getty Images
Limp is “very confident” that New Glenn will be on the market before the end of the year. And Blue plans to quickly increase the frequency of New Glenn missions, aiming to conduct up to 10 New Glenn launches next year. However, there is still a long way to go to rival SpaceX, which is aiming for almost 150 Falcon rocket launches this year.
Perhaps even more optimistically, Blue aims to land New Glenn on its very first launch, cheekily calling the booster “So you're telling me there's a chance.” No company has managed to land on its first attempt at an orbital rocket booster, and New Glenn is aiming for a 200-foot-wide landing platform on a ship called Jacklyn in the Atlantic Ocean.
“It will be adventurous. It will be fun. I'm looking forward to it…but if we [don’t] Stick the landing the first time, that's okay. We have another booster right behind it. “We’re going to build more,” Limp said.
The first flight of the New Glenn launch vehicle.
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It seems almost inevitable that New Glenn's future will include a manned spacecraft – especially given Blue's long-standing mission: “We envision millions of people living and working in space for the benefit of Earth.” Currently, that's all SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft approved by NASA to fly astronauts into orbit and back Boeings Starliner suffered another setback this summer.
But Limp pushed it back when asked about the development of a New Glenn Crew capsule: “There's nothing to say about that.”
Blue Origin has gained experience in the lower-risk, suborbital realm of human spaceflight with its New Shepard rocket and capsule. Limp noted that Blue Origin is working to “get New Shepard back to a regular flight rhythm,” with both crews and research cargo flying.
It has completed two New Shepard missions this year and is planning a third next week. This mission will also include a new rocket booster and capsule to add a second vehicle “to better meet growing customer demand,” the company said after losing a booster in a cargo flight failure in September 2022.
Beyond New Glenn and engine production, Blue is making further progress: Last year, the company won a $3.4 billion contract from NASA to build a lunar lander for the agency's astronauts. In the spring, Blue gained access to the Pentagon's lucrative National Security Space Launch program, a turnaround after missing the previous phase of NSSL in 2020.
Limp spends his time on a “little return trip between” Blue Origin facilities every two and a half weeks. He visits headquarters in Seattle, meets with customers in Washington, DC, checks out engine production and testing in Huntsville, Alabama, and finally tours New Glenn's work in Cape Canaveral, Texas. It's all part of his interest in running a real space company, rather than a billionaire's hobby.
“Let’s have the financial discipline to build a company we love, and let’s make decisions quickly, knowing we’ll make some mistakes. But let’s not make the same mistakes and fix them quickly,” Limp said.
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