For most of its two decades of existence, Blue Origin was like Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory in Roald Dahl’s children’s book.
It was a rocket company founded by Jeffrey P. Bezos, the billionaire who created Amazon. This was well known. What the company was really doing was shrouded in mystery.
“But everyone wanted to get in,” laughed Carissa Christensen, founder and chief executive of Bryce Space and Technology, an aerospace consultancy.
Bezos announced on Tuesday that he would step down as chief executive of Amazon this summer and become chief executive. In his letter to Amazon employees, he said he wanted to invest time and energy in other passions and listed Blue Origin among them.
The next few years for Blue Origin promise to be busy – transporting tourists on short suborbital journeys, launching satellites on a new rocket, developing a lunar module for NASA.
Does this mean that Bezos will have a bigger role in the day-to-day life of your rocket company?
“If Jeff chose to spend more time at Blue Origin during the next phase of his career, that would be a very good thing for Blue,” said Rob Meyerson, who was president of Blue Origin from 2003 to 2017. “He brings great intelligence , great operational experience and great passion for the mission for the business. “
Mr. Meyerson noted that Mr. Bezos’ other ventures include the Bezos Earth Fund, which last year gave a $ 100 million donation to the Environmental Defense Fund to build and operate a methane detection satellite. Amazon, where Bezos will continue to be involved, is developing Project Kuiper, a constellation of satellites to send Internet services to Earth.
“It is clear that space will be a prominent theme,” said Meyerson.
Mr. Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000 – two years before Elon Musk founded Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, better known as SpaceX.
But while Musk and SpaceX have already built a thriving business – launching NASA satellites and astronauts to orbit and developing a huge rocket called the Starship that should take people to Mars someday – Blue Origin seems to be lagging behind.
In its early days, the company offered news drops only occasionally. Reporters would call Blue Origin’s public relations firm to get a superficial “refusal of comment” from the company.
In November 2006, a gum-drop test craft lifted a modest 285 feet in the air and gently returned to the ground at a test site in western Texas. Mr. Bezos reported the success of a blog post on the Blue Origin website – a month and a half later.
There were no further updates for four and a half years, until Bezos acknowledged that a test vehicle had crashed, but only after The Wall Street Journal reported the failure.
Over the years, Blue Origin has become less secretive. Five years ago, Mr. Bezos welcomed a group of reporters for a tour of the company’s headquarters in Kent, Wash., A few miles south of Seattle. During lunch, he happily answered questions. “It is a total pleasure,” he said then. “I hope you feel like I like this.”
Since then, Blue Origin has grown rapidly. She has a contract with NASA to develop a probe that could take astronauts to the surface of the moon in a few years. It sells rocket engines to another rocket company, the United Launch Alliance. He charges customers to do scientific experiments on New Shepard, a suborbital spacecraft.
But these are so far modest in scope. Blue Origin has not yet started sales for New Shepard’s core business – taking tourists on short rides to the edge of space – or even had people on board on any of the test flights so far.
The new Glenn, a larger rocket that would compete with SpaceX’s Falcon 9 workhorse, will not take off on its maiden flight at least later this year.
“They have big plans, but they have not yet launched humans on board any of their ships,” said Laura Seward Forczyk, owner of Astralytical, a space consulting company.
Musk and Bezos have periodically discussed their rockets and whether humans should aim at Mars – Musk’s final destination – or build floating colonies as Bezos imagines.
In an interview with Maureen Dowd last year, Musk gave a mild compliment to Bezos and Blue Origin: “The rate of progress is very slow and the amount of years he has left is not enough, but I am still happy that he is doing you’re doing with Blue Origin ”.
This does not necessarily mean that Blue Origin is far behind.
During his tour with reporters in 2016, Mr. Bezos pointed to an image in the central area of the headquarters. It showed two turtles holding an hourglass and looking at the cosmos. Below was the motto of Blue Origin: Gradatim ferociter, which in Latin means “step by step, ferociously”.
Blue Origin can hope to become the turtle of the fable where slow and steady eventually overcomes the fast hare. Bezos’s fortune – he has been selling billions of dollars in Amazon stock to help finance Blue Origin – has enabled Blue Origin to follow a long-term methodical plan without the need to generate a lot of revenue in the short term.
Mr. Bezos spoke in more detail about a future where millions of people will live and work in space. Blue Origin’s goal, he said, is to help people get there.
“We are going to build a road to space,” said Bezos during a presentation in 2019, when he revealed the design of a lunar module. “And then incredible things will happen.”
Blue Origin now has a rocket engine factory in Huntsville, Alabama, and huge facilities around NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida for assembling New Glenn rockets.
In 2016, Mr. Bezos said he spent one day a week at Blue Origin. Although he majored in electrical engineering and computer science at Princeton as a graduate student, Mr. Bezos let his engineers talk about the technical aspects of the Blue Origin spacecraft to reporters.
In contrast, Musk, with the title of chief engineer, is deeply involved in engineering details at SpaceX, although Gwynne Shotwell, the president and chief operating officer, handles many of the company’s day-to-day details.
So as Blue Origin shifts from research and development to the pursuit of revenue and profits, now may be an ideal time to bring someone with Amazon’s commercial success.
“He’s a businessman who knows how to make money,” said Christensen. “Perhaps this is the moment when it is very attractive for him to stay away.”
She added: “Amazon was like no other company before that. If Jeff Bezos is really going to devote more time to Blue, I wonder if it will become like no other launch company before it. “