With successful New Glenn flight, Blue Origin may finally be turning the corner

If one were to observe that I have written critically about Blue Origin over the last half-decade, they would not be wrong. The reality is that the space company founded by Jeff Bezos has underperformed. Its chief executive for most of this time, Bob Smith, was poorly regarded by his employees. He brought the worst of "old space" tendencies to Blue Origin from Honeywell. And under Smith's leadership, Blue was litigious, slow, and unproductive. Frankly, it was a bad look for Bezos. He was pumping something on the order of $2 billion a year into Blue Origin for what, exactly? Lawsuits against NASA? Jokes about BE-4 rocket engine delays? Ars published critical articles about Blue Origin because the company could be so much more, and the Western spaceflight community desperately wants a second new space contender to challenge SpaceX's increasingly dominant position. Finally, about 18 months ago, Bezos moved on from Bob Smith. He installed a long-time lieutenant from Amazon, Dave Limp, to get Blue Origin moving forward. Although there were concerns about Limp's background, which included little aerospace experience, it now seems clear that he has taken a strong hand at Blue since he took over the reins in December 2023. In the time I have spent with him, Limp seems energetic, enthused, and committed to turning the ship around at Blue Origin. He has made it clear that the mandate he received from Bezos is to execute on the company's programs—and to do so with urgency. "Everybody believes in this mission," Limp said of Blue Origin's plans to enable millions of people to live and work in space. "So that was kind of the foundation which you could build a house on. But I think that getting the organization a little bit more focused was critical. We had a lot of balls in the air. We still do, but it was important to make sure that the organization knows what the priorities were for us this year. We weren't getting anywhere without engines and without New Glenn." When I met with Limp and Bezos earlier this month on a balcony overlooking the main factory in Florida where future New Glenn rockets are built, there did seem to be a clear sense of urgency. Several times during our interview, one of us had to speak up to be heard over the clanging of this or banging of that. Days later, the New Glenn rocket took flight for the first time. The flight was a smashing success, with both the rocket's first and second stages performing nominally, an impressive achievement for a company's first orbital launch attempt. Although the first stage was not recovered, it was not expected to be on the first try. Many aerospace engineers and technicians will tell you that a rocket company doesn't become a real rocket company until it reaches orbit. Well, by that definition, Blue Origin is now a real rocket company. And with Limp's leadership and Bezos' renewed energy and enthusiasm, the successful launch appears to mark a critical moment for Blue looking ahead.

So where are they going?

The near-term step is clear: getting better at building engines and rockets and flying New Glenn regularly. At times during his remarks, Bezos sounded a lot like SpaceX founder Elon Musk, who has spoken about "building the machine that builds the machine" over the last decade with respect to both Tesla vehicles and SpaceX rockets. Asked about Blue's current priorities, Bezos responded, "Rate manufacturing and driving urgency around the machine that makes the machine." He noted that Blue Origin built a factory in Huntsville, Alabama, but it took time to get it up and running, and then running efficiently. "Same thing here with the second stage," he said, referring to the New Glenn factory in Florida. "We need to produce a lot of second stages. And we need to produce a lot of booster stages, too. We’re completely vertically integrated, so it’s making those valves, it’s making the igniters. There needs to be rate manufacturing of everything you can imagine that goes into a rocket."

One of the key questions about Blue Origin is whether it will push toward full reusability with New Glenn. In 2021, Ars first reported on an effort codenamed "Project Jarvis" to develop a stainless steel upper stage that could be reused. The company even built a test tank, although the effort was eventually shelved. The current upper stage of the rocket uses two BE-3U engines and is 23 meters (77 feet) tall. Multiple sources have said the upper stage is expensive, at least in its initial configuration, and that this significantly inflates the cost of building New Glenn. Bezos said the company would "compete" two solutions to this problem against one another: developing a reusable upper stage or driving down the manufacturing cost of the stage. "If you can drive your manufacturing costs low enough in rate manufacturing—if you ever get to a really well-oiled machine that makes the machine—it's possible that, because of the performance increase that you get with an expendable upper stage, that could be the right solution for a long time," Bezos said. "So we're going to try to make the expendable upper stage so cheap to manufacture that a reusable stage can never compete with it. And we're going to try to make the reusable stage so operable that an expendable stage can never compete with it." This competition will play out over the coming years as Blue Origin seeks to ramp up its launch cadence. "We'll see which one wins," Bezos said. "It's not something that you can do on paper. You just have to try both." Blue Origin has not disclosed its internal costs to produce New Glenn, but with seven main engines on the booster stage, it's likely not cheap. From talking to Bezos and Limp, it's clear they want to drive down those costs. "There is still a lot of room with these heavy lift vehicles to reduce cost even further," Limp said. "To get a kilogram to any orbit or to the lunar surface, we've got to take two orders of magnitude out of the cost. If you think about what happened in the automotive industry or television industry, you can really crank down costs. So this is the very beginning of that."

It’s still day one

Blue Origin's motto is "Gradatim Ferociter," which is Latin for "Step by Step, Ferociously." (We're big fans of Latin at Ars. If you've ever stumbled over the name of the site, it's Latin for "the art of technology," which is what we cover.) The long-running joke in the space industry is that we'd all like to see a little less "gradatim" and a little more "ferociter" from Blue Origin. The company's coat of arms—yes, it has one—prominently features two turtles. A turtle logo is also stamped onto a New Shepard spacecraft after every mission. This is a reference to one of Aesop's Fables, "The Tortoise and the Hare," in which the slow and steady tortoise wins the race. Bezos clearly believes Blue Origin is the tortoise that will win the space race.

When someone points out that Blue Origin has existed for nearly a quarter of a century, defenders of the company will say that Blue spent the first decade of that time largely operating as a think tank. Although this is, to some extent, true, Blue Origin was developing hardware by around 2005. From my reporting on the early years of SpaceX, I spoke with multiple engineers who were poached by Blue Origin or vice versa. There was a hot competition for the sharpest rocket scientists coming out of the best schools during this time. So yes, Blue Origin started as a think tank, and it remained small, but it absolutely has been developing hardware for two decades now. And what deliverables does it have to show for this? Its suborbital launch system, New Shepard, has flown 28 missions. Four of its BE-4 rocket engines have powered two launches of United Launch Alliance's Vulcan rocket to orbit. And there was this month's New Glenn launch. That's it. It feels almost cruel to compare Blue Origin to SpaceX, which would be the "hare" in this fable. But it's necessary to do so. Founded in 2002, a couple of years after Blue Origin, SpaceX has launched about 450 orbital rockets to Blue Origin's one. It has put nearly six dozen astronauts into orbit, saving NASA from having to rely on Russia at a time of heightened geopolitical tension. Its Starlink constellation of more than 7,000 satellites delivers broadband Internet around the world. SpaceX is also developing the largest rocket in the world, Starship, with the aim of full reusability. When I wrote Reentry, my book about the Falcon 9 era at SpaceX, I spoke with someone who had worked at both companies. I asked them what the biggest difference between the two environments was. The quote, from the time period long before Limp became chief executive, reveals the magnitude of the challenge. "They are the world’s largest single-donor nonprofit," this person told me of Blue Origin. "There is zero incentive to operate like SpaceX. Like, zero. I know I’m going to get fed no matter what. The doors will never close. They start off with a huge disadvantage there. When you have a funding model like that, you attract the dreamer who says, ‘Where can I go to work on something crazy and make a good salary at 40 hours a week? Where can you work on a space elevator and get paid? Who are the types of people who want to work on space elevators?’ So there’s a selection bias. You need to take extraordinary measures to account for that, and they don’t have them." In Blue Origin's defense, the products they have delivered have been of high quality. New Shepard has set the bar for suborbital space tourism. The BE-4 engine has performed excellently. And, of course, New Glenn performed well on its first flight. But there are many people in the industry who would like to see Blue Origin move much faster, and indeed, to come close to SpaceX, it must do exactly that. I asked Bezos about this. "I would say, 'Stay tuned,'" he said. "This is the very beginning of the Space Age. When the history is finally written hundreds of years from now, the 1960s will be a certain kind of beginning, and [there were] certainly incredible accomplishments. But now we're really getting started. That was kind of pulled forward from its natural time, the space race with the Soviets. And now is the time when the real movement, the kind of golden age of space, is going to happen. It's still absolutely day one. There are going to be multiple winners. SpaceX is going to be successful. Blue Origin is going to be successful. And there are other companies who haven't even been founded yet that are going to grow into fantastic, giant space companies. So the vision that I think people should have is that this is the absolute beginning."

Next steps

When one walks through the New Glenn factory in Florida, the impressive scale is inescapable. Critically, the company appears to be hardware-rich, with multiple first and second stages in various states of work. When Bezos talks about launching several more times this year, it seems plausible. In the lobby of the main building, there's a mock-up of the company's first lunar lander, Mark 1. It towers three stories tall. It's massive. "That’s the small one," Bezos commented. "Mark 2 is twice as tall and twice as wide." These are impressive vehicles, built on a large scale. They're important first steps toward delivering cargo—Mark 1 could launch within the next 12 to 18 months—and eventually crew. But none of these next steps can happen without New Glenn as the foundational first step. That's why this month's launch was so important.

Bezos is clearly thinking through all this methodically. First, develop the road to space. And once you have that, what's next? You need to learn to live off the land. "In my mind, the next big step is in situ resource development," he said. "So that's really a big unlock. For example, if you can make propellant on the Moon, that's a really big deal. You know, lifting a kilogram of mass off the Moon takes 25 times less energy than lifting a kilogram of mass off Earth. So if you're talking about moving about the Solar System, being able to get propellants and other materials, construction materials and so on from heavenly bodies is a big deal." It's a great vision, and it's nice to finally see Blue taking the first steps. What happens next will come down to Bezos' will, his finances, and whatever path the US government decides to follow. Days after New Glenn's first launch, Bezos attended the inauguration of Donald Trump, standing near Musk. The founder of SpaceX played a major role in getting Trump elected and has been advising him on space policy. Bezos and Musk, the tortoise and the hare, appeared chatty and friendly in a way that has not been the norm for the rivals. More commonly, they have sniped at one another rather than chummed it up. Perhaps now, they'll team up to help America spread among the stars. We'll see. Musk is interested in Mars, and Bezos is more fixated on the Moon. Ultimately, Trump may tell them both to follow their hearts, with the US government coming along for the ride.