Blue Origin CEO Dave Lieb, left, and founder Jeff Bezos look at a New Glenn rocket at the company’s LC-36 facility in Florida.
Blue Origin
Dave Lieb had just one question for Jeff Bezos when he interviewed last year to become CEO of Blue Origin, the billionaire’s space venture.
“Jeff, is Blue Origin a hobby or a business?” asked Lieb.
After 14 years as a senior Amazon executive, Limp told CNBC that he made it clear to Bezos that he wasn’t interested in leading Blue Origin if the nearly 25-year-old business wasn’t destined to become a serious company.
“I don’t know how to run a hobby,” Lieb said, adding that “if it was a hobby, it’s not right for me.”
But he said Bezos was adamant that Blue Origin should be a business.
Lieb admitted that it took some convincing from Bezos to make the transition into space. “My initial reaction was: It’s not the right role 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] construction know-how required; determination required. it takes some energy,” said Lieb.
Limp has now been Blue Origin’s CEO for nine months and counting. He took over from previous leadership that had vastly expanded the company’s workforce and infrastructure, but had fallen years behind on several major projects and lost bids for key government contracts.
CEO Dave Limp, third from left, with Blue Origin employees at the company’s facility in New Glenn, Florida.
Blue Origin
Blue Origin has been flying tourists and explorers to the edge of space on short excursions, including Bezos itself, for years. And for the past two decades, Bezos has spent billions of dollars a year to turn Blue Origin into a space powerhouse. The company’s projects range from rockets and spacecraft to space stations and lunar landers.
However, in the orbital mission industry table stakes, Blue Origin has not entered the serious rocket game as the US launch 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 the New Glenn rocket. At about 320 feet tall, the launch vehicle is touted to lift up to 45,000 kilograms (or more than 99,000 pounds) into low Earth orbit — twice as much as SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket.
A New Glenn rocket is on LC-36 for the first time for tank and mechanical systems testing on February 21, 2024.
Blue Origin
Like Falcon 9, New Glenn is designed to be partially reusable. Blue Origin aims to return and land the rocket’s booster, its largest and most valuable part, to unlock the kind of cost-time efficiency that SpaceX claims with its rockets.
New Glenn’s first launch attempt is scheduled for November. Blue Origin is in the final stages of putting it all together, including conducting one recent critical test launch of the missile’s upper stage last month.
Initially the company aimed for the audacious feat of flying NASA’s ESCAPADE mission to Mars on New Glenn’s debut. But with a shrinking launch window, the agency delayed ESCAPADE to a later launch. In place of the mission, Blue Origin will fly a demonstration of its spacecraft Blue ring on the first launch of New Glenn.
Culture change
Company employees stand below a New Glenn rocket during testing in February 2024.
Blue Origin
Headquartered in the Seattle suburb of Kent, Washington, Blue Origin has more than 10,000 employees there and in half a dozen other major locations around the country, including the industrial strongholds of Texas, Florida and Alabama. Speaking bluntly, Limp said Blue Origin has been “in kind of an R&D phase for a long time,” an aspect of the company’s culture that he’s trying to change.
“We were very, very good at building shiny factories and very good at building high-fidelity prototypes. And some of those prototypes even flew … but that’s not what we want to do to become a world-class manufacturer,” Limp said.
“We have to be able to build a lot of things,” he added.
But he said he sees a genuine enthusiasm for the space in Blue’s workforce, calling that passion the foundation of a “missional culture.” In Limp’s view, Amazon’s customer-centric principles drive the tech giant’s culture — but Amazon doesn’t have “the intense mission that Blue has.”
“People’s eyes light up, almost to a T. They grew up thinking about space, they always wanted to work in the space industry, and here they are in Blue working in space,” Limp said.
Now he’s trying to install Amazon’s customer-centric focus as a core part of Blue Origin. While Blue’s customers—such as NASA, ULA, and suborbital astronauts—are quite different from the consumers Limp focused on, his message to Blue employees is to make delivering for their customers the top priority.
“Even if the technology is really cool and fun … the customer has to be front and center,” Limp said.
To further change Blue’s culture, Limp highlighted a number of key leadership additions: Allen Parker as CFO after previous CFO positions at Zillow and Amazon; Jennifer Pena-Leanos as Chief People Officer, after running HR at Limp’s previous Amazon Devices team. Ian Richardson as senior vice president of manufacturing operations after a long stint as SpaceX’s director of production. and Tim Collins as vice president of global supply chain after previous global operations for Flexport and Amazon.
Limp also made a change by moving more of the company’s staff to the plant.
“You can walk into a factory and know when it’s working well and know when it’s not,” he said. “It doesn’t matter how much capex you put in, what kind of machinery you have, if you don’t use it the right way. It’s like having a shiny new car sitting on the road — what fun is that?”
2024 top priorities
A BE-4 engine test at Blue Origin’s Launch Site One facility in West Texas, August 2, 2019.
Blue Origin
Limp has two main goals for his first year as CEO: Launch the New Glenn and get Blue’s engine production humming.
“We’re not going anywhere without engines, and we had to figure out how to build engines at pace,” Limp said.
Blue Origin’s BE-4 engine powers both the New Glenn rocket and ULA’s Vulcan rocket. The latter requires two engines per launch.
With ULA targeting four Vulcan launches this year — with two down and two more to go — Blue 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 to [be delivering] about one engine a week until the end of the year. I’m not sure we’ll get to exactly a week, but it’ll be under 10 days… [and] by the end of 2025, we need to be faster than that,” said Lieb.
A United Launch Alliance Vulcan Centaur rocket blasts off from pad 41 at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 7:25 a.m. on October 4, 2024 in Cape Canaveral, Florida.
Paul Hennessy | Anadolu | Getty Images
Limp has a “very high level of confidence” that New Glenn will be released before the end of the year. And Blue plans to quickly ramp up the pace of New Glenn missions, wanting to perform as many as 10 New Glenn launches in the next year. But it still has a ways to go to rival SpaceX, which is aiming for nearly 150 Falcon rocket launches this year.
Perhaps even more optimistically, Blue aims to land New Glenn on its first release, boldly naming the booster “So You’re Telling Me There’s a Chance.” No company has nailed the first-try landing with an orbital booster, and New Glenn will aim for a 200-foot-wide pad in a boat named Jacklyn in the Atlantic Ocean.
“It’s going to be adventurous. It’s going to be fun. I’m excited about it… but if [don’t] stick the landing the first time, it’s okay. We have another booster right behind. We will build more,” said Lieb.
The first flight of a New Glenn booster rocket.
Blue Origin
It seems almost inevitable that New Glenn’s future will include a crewed spacecraft — especially given Blue’s long-standing mission: “We envision millions of people living and working in space for the benefit of Earth.” Currently, only SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft is certified by NASA to fly astronauts to and from orbit after of Boeing The Starliner suffered another setback this summer.
But Limp deferred 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 the New Shepard rocket and capsule. Lieb noted that Blue Origin is working to get “New Shepard back into a routine flight rhythm,” both for flying crews and research payloads.
He’s done two New Shepard missions this year, and he’s aiming for the third next week. That mission will also include a new rocket booster and a capsule to add a second vehicle “to better meet growing customer demand,” the company said, having lost a booster during a cargo flight failure in September 2022 .
Beyond New Glenn and engine production, Blue is making more progress: Last year it won a $3.4 billion contract with NASA to build a lunar lander for the agency’s astronauts. In the spring, Blue entered the Pentagon’s lucrative National Security Space Launch program, a turnaround from missing out on the previous NSSL phase in 2020.
As for Limp, he spends his time on “a little round trip between” Blue Origin’s facilities every 2½ weeks. It goes from its headquarters in Seattle, to meetings with customers in Washington, DC, to see engine production and testing in Huntsville, Alabama, and finally to check on the work of New Glenn in Cape Canaveral, Texas. It’s all part of his interest in leading a proper space company, rather than a billionaire’s hobby.
“Let’s have the financial discipline to build a business we love and let’s make decisions quickly, knowing we’re going to make some mistakes. But let’s not make the same mistakes and let’s heal them quickly,” Lieb said.