Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp brings urgency to Jeff Bezos' space company

Dave Limp had only one query for Jeff Bezos when he interviewed last 12 months 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 real 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 an organization.

Limp admitted that Bezos needed some convincing to maneuver 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 religion.

“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 corporate's workforce and infrastructure but had fallen behind for years on several major programs and lost competitions for key government contracts.

Blue Origin has been flying tourists and researchers on short trips to the sting of space for years, including Bezos himself. And for the past 20 years, Bezos has spent billions of dollars annually to construct Blue Origin right into a space powerhouse. The company's projects range from rockets and spacecraft to space stations and lunar landers.

But within the orbital mission industry, Blue Origin has not yet entered the intense rocket business, because the US launch vehicle market continues to be dominated by SpaceX, followed by United Launch Alliance. Rocket Lab and Firefly Aerospace.

But the corporate said it’s closer than ever to the long-awaited debut of its New Glenn rocket. At a height of about 320 feet, the launch vehicle is predicted to give you the chance to lift as much as 45,000 kilograms (or over 99,000 kilos) to low Earth orbit – twice as much because the Falcon 9 rocket, SpaceX's workhorse.

Like Falcon 9, New Glenn is partially reusable. Blue Origin goals to return and land the launch engine, the biggest and most precious a part of the rocket, to realize the sort of cost and time savings that SpaceX guarantees with its rockets.

New Glenn's first launch attempt is scheduled for November. Blue Origin is in the ultimate stages of compilation, including conducting a A vital test firing of the rocket's upper stage recently took place last month.

The company originally aimed for the audacious feat of flying NASA's ESCAPADE mission to Mars in New Glenn's debut. But because the launch window became increasingly narrow, the agency postponed ESCAPADE to a later launch. In lieu of the mission, Blue Origin will conduct an indication of its spacecraft Blue ring at New Glenn's first launch.

Headquartered within the Seattle suburb of Kent, Washington, Blue Origin employs greater than 10,000 people there and at half a dozen other key locations across the country, including in the commercial 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,” a side of the corporate's culture that he’s trying to vary.

“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 need to be able to build a lot,” he added.

But he said he sees an actual passion for space amongst Blue's workforce, calling that zeal the inspiration 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.” ?”

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.

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 probability.” 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 platform Ship named Jacklyn in the Atlantic.

“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.

It seems almost inevitable that New Glenn's future will include a manned spacecraft – especially given Blue's long-standing mission: “We envision hundreds of thousands of individuals living and dealing in space for the advantage 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 back when asked about developing 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 daily flight rhythm,” with both crews and research cargo flying.

It has completed two New Shepard missions this year, and this is the case I'm aiming for a third next week. This mission will also include a new rocket booster and capsule to add a second vehicle “to raised 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.