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

Dave Limp had only 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?” Limp asked.

After 14 years as a senior Amazon executive, Limp told CNBC he made it clear to Bezos that he wasn’t interested in leading Blue Origin if the nearly 25-year-old venture wasn’t intended to be a serious company.

“I don’t know how to run a hobby,” Limp said, adding that “if it was a hobby, it’s not right for me.”

But he said Bezos was adamant that Blue Origin needed to be a business.

Limp admitted that it took some convincing from Bezos for him to make the move over to the space sector. “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] needed manufacturing expertise; it needed decisiveness; it need a little bit of energy,” Limp said.

Limp has now been the CEO of Blue Origin for nine months and counting. He took the reins from prior leadership who had widely expanded the company’s workforce and infrastructure but had fallen years behind on several major programs and lost competitions for key government contracts.

Blue Origin for years has been flying tourists and research to the edge of space on short jaunts, including Bezos himself. And over the past two decades, Bezos has been spending billions of dollars a year to turn Blue Origin into a space sector powerhouse. The company’s projects reach from rockets and spacecraft to space stations and lunar landers.

Yet in the industry table stakes of orbital missions, Blue Origin has not entered the serious rocketry game, as the U.S. launch market remains dominated by SpaceX, followed by United Launch Alliance, Rocket Lab and Firefly Aerospace.

But the company said it’s closer than ever to the long-awaited debut of its New Glenn rocket. Towering about 320 feet tall, the launch vehicle is advertised as lifting as much as 45,000 kilograms (or over 99,000 pounds) to low Earth orbit — double that of SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9 rocket.

Like Falcon 9, New Glenn is designed to be partly reusable. Blue Origin aims to return and land the rocket’s booster, its largest and most valuable section, to unlock the kind of cost and time efficiencies that SpaceX claims with its rockets.

New Glenn’s first launch attempt is slated for November. Blue Origin is in the final stages of putting it all together, including conducting a recent crucial test firing of the rocket’s upper stage last month.

Originally the company was aiming for the audacious feat of flying NASA’s ESCAPADE mission to Mars on New Glenn’s debut. But with a dwindling launch window, the agency delayed ESCAPADE to a later launch. In the mission’s place, Blue Origin will fly a demonstration of its spacecraft Blue Ring on the first New Glenn launch.

Headquartered in the Seattle suburb of Kent, Washington, Blue Origin has over 10,000 employees there and in half a dozen other major locations around the country, including in industry strongholds of Texas, Florida and Alabama. Speaking plainly, Limp said Blue Origin has been “in kind of an R&D phase for a long time,” an aspect of the company’s culture 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 scale to be a world class manufacturer,” Limp said. 

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

But he said he sees genuine excitement for space across Blue’s workforce, calling that passion the foundation 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 exists at Blue.”

“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 at Blue working on space,” Limp said.

Now he’s trying to install Amazon’s customer-centric focus as a key part of Blue Origin. While Blue’s customers — the likes of NASA, ULA, and suborbital astronauts — are quite a bit different than the consumers Limp used to focus on, his message to Blue’s employees is to make delivering for its customers the top priority.

“Even if the technology is really nice and fun … the customer has to be front and center,” Limp said.

To further shift Blue’s culture, Limp highlighted a number of key leadership additions: Allen Parker as CFO after past executive finance roles at Zillow and Amazon; Jennifer Pena-Leanos as chief people officer, after running human resources in Limp’s prior Amazon Devices team; Ian Richardson as senior vice president of manufacturing operations after a long stint as SpaceX production director; and Tim Collins as the vice president of global supply chain after previously leading global operations for Flexport and Amazon.

Limp also made a change by moving more of the company’s headcount to the factory floor.

“You can walk into a factory and know when it’s running well and know when it’s not,” he said. “It doesn’t matter how much capex you put in place, what kind of machines you have, if you’re not using them the right way. It’s like having a shiny new car that just sits in the driveway — what fun is that?” 

Blue Origin’s BE-4 engine powers both its New Glenn rocket as well as ULA’s Vulcan rocket. The latter requires two engines per launch.

Perhaps even more optimistically, Blue aims to land New Glenn on its very first launch, cheekily naming the booster “So You’re Telling Me There’s a Chance.” No company has stuck the landing on the first try with an orbital rocket booster, and New Glenn will be aiming for a 200-foot-wide pad on a vessel named Jacklyn in the Atlantic Ocean.

“It’ll be adventurous. It’ll be fun. I’m excited about it … but if we [don’t] stick the landing the first time, that’s OK. We’ve got another booster right behind it. We’ll build more,” Limp said.

It seems almost inevitable that New Glenn’s future will involve a crew 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 Boeing’s Starliner suffered another setback this summer. 

But Limp deferred when asked about development of a New Glenn crew capsule: “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 cadence of regular flights,” flying both crews and research cargo.

It’s done two New Shepard missions this year, and is aiming for a third next week. That mission will also feature a new rocket booster and 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’s making more progress: Last year it won a $3.4 billion NASA contract to build a lunar lander for the agency’s astronauts. In the spring, Blue got entry into the Pentagon’s lucrative National Security Space Launch program, a turnaround from having missed out on the previous phase of NSSL in 2020.

As for Limp, he’s spending his time on “a little bit of a round trip between” Blue Origin’s facilities every 2½ weeks. He goes from its Seattle headquarters, to meeting with customers in Washington, D.C., to seeing engine production and testing in Huntsville, Alabama, and finally checking out New Glenn work at 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 that we love, and let’s make decisions quickly, knowing that we’ll make some mistakes. But let’s not make the same mistakes, and let’s cure them quick,” Limp said.