Blue Origin's motto is “Gradatim Ferociter!” which is Latin for “Step by step, furious!” The company's mascot is a turtle.
In its early days, it operated in secrecy. It started with a small, suborbital New Shepard rocket and capsule to gain experience with hydrogen engines and reusable vehicle landings.
It was a well-thought-out, gradual progression. And it took time to perform each step.
There's an old joke: “How can I make a little money in the rocket business?”
Punchline: “Let’s start with the super rich.”
Jeff Bezos, who became one of the richest people in the world as the founder of Amazon, is perhaps the best example to prove the joke's premise that rockets are a quick and easy way to lose a lot of money. .
Bezos founded Blue Origin two years before Elon Musk founded SpaceX, when Musk was relatively poor and far from billionaire status.
Since then, Mr. Bezos has poured billions of his personal fortune into Blue Origin, and while SpaceX has yet to launch its first rocket into orbit, it has become the world's top rocket company.
Perhaps because of Mr. Bezos' money, Blue Origin has taken a more slow-and-steady approach than SpaceX, closer to traditional aerospace companies like United Launch Alliance and Northrop Grumman.
Mr. Musk didn't have the unlimited funds that Mr. Bezos had, and SpaceX didn't have the luxury of time. It was fastidious, nimble, and had to bet big on itself.
After the first three launches of its small Falcon 1 rocket failed, SpaceX has told NASA it can successfully develop a much larger Falcon 9 rocket to carry cargo to the International Space Station. I persuaded you.
After three failures, SpaceX nearly ran out of money. Musk's other company, the electric car maker Tesla, was on the brink of bankruptcy, and Musk himself was on the verge of bankruptcy.
SpaceX has scraped together enough spare parts for a fourth Falcon 1. If it failed, SpaceX would disappear, joining a long list of forgotten space companies.
Traditional aerospace giants all had talented engineers and deep knowledge and experience.
They could have made a big bet to reduce launch costs and disrupt the rocket business. However, they concluded that the technical and financial risks were too great, and that they were already making healthy profits, and did not try.
For example, United Launch Alliance engineers were looking at the possibility of landing and reusing the rocket's booster stages, much like SpaceX is currently doing with the Falcon 9.
However, due to the small number of launches that ULA was making each year, it appeared to be a pointless and money-losing effort, and the idea was filed away.
This is similar to when Intel passed up the opportunity to make processors for Apple's first iPhone in 2006. In the short term, Intel calculated that there was no way they could benefit from doing so.
Similarly, other rocket companies didn't expect that lower launch costs would bring in enough new customers to make it worth the trouble. SpaceX did just that, transforming the business of space travel.
Perhaps more importantly, Musk realized he could use the Falcon 9's low cost to deploy a constellation of thousands of Internet satellites. This, too, was a business idea that other companies, particularly Motorola's Iridium satellites of the late 1990s, could not make profitable. .
Blue Origin now appears to be picking up the pace. In a December 2023 interview with podcaster Rex Fridman, Bezos said he was stepping down as Amazon's chief executive to give Blue Origin energy and urgency, saying, “We should have done it sooner.'' We need to act.” Podcast. “And I intend to.”
That same month, Dave Limp, a longtime Amazon executive responsible for the company's consumer electronics division, which includes the Echo smart speaker and Kindle e-book reader, became Blue Origin's chief executive officer.
He, too, has talked about making the company more agile and decisive, saying in an interview last year, “What we were doing may have been trying to be perfect in a lot of things.” He spoke at
By taking a little more risk, he says, “you can move much faster.”
Bezos recently said he expects Blue Origin to ultimately make more money than Amazon. Like SpaceX, the company doesn't envision New Glenn as just a rocket to launch satellites for customers. The company sees the spacecraft as a foundational vehicle to support other space projects, such as the lunar lander and orbiting space station.
