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

Dave Limp had just one question for Jeff Bezos when he interviewed last year to become CEO of Blue Origin, the billionaire’s space company.

“Jeff, is Blue Origin a hobby or a business? » asked Boitant.

After 14 years as a senior Amazon executive, Limp told CNBC that he made it clear to Bezos that he was not interested in running Blue Origin if the nearly 25-year-old company was not intended to be a serious business.

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

But he added that Bezos was adamant that Blue Origin should be a business.

Limp admitted that it took convincing Bezos to move into the space sector. “My first reaction was: This is not the right position for me because I’m not an aerospace engineer,” he said. But he decided to take the plunge.

“Jeff felt that [Blue Origin] manufacturing expertise required; it was necessary to show determination; it takes a little energy,” Limp said.

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

For years, Blue Origin has taken tourists and researchers to the edge of space on short jaunts, including Bezos himself. And over the past two decades, Bezos has spent billions of dollars a year to build Blue Origin into a space industry powerhouse. The company’s projects range from rockets and spacecraft to space stations and lunar landers.

However, in the issue of orbital missions, Blue Origin has not entered the serious rocket game, because the American launch market remains dominated by SpaceX, followed by United Launch Alliance, Rocket Lab and Firefly Aérospatiale.

But the company said it is closer than ever to the long-awaited launch of its New Glenn rocket. Standing about 320 feet tall, the launcher is billed as being able to lift up to 45,000 kilograms (or more than 99,000 pounds) into low-Earth orbit, double that of SpaceX’s 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 boasts with its rockets.

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

The company originally aimed for the daring feat of flying NASA’s ESCAPADE mission to Mars during New Glenn’s debut. But with the launch window shrinking, the agency postponed ESCAPADE until a later launch. In place of the mission, Blue Origin will demonstrate its spacecraft Blue ring on the first launch of New Glenn.

Headquartered in the Seattle suburb of Kent, Washington, Blue Origin has more than 10,000 employees there and at a half-dozen other major locations across the country, including industrial strongholds in Texas, Florida and from Alabama. Speaking plainly, Limp said Blue Origin has been “in a sort of R&D phase for a long time,” an aspect of the company 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 become a manufacturer of world class,” Limp said.

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

But he said he sees a real enthusiasm for space within Blue’s workforce, calling that passion the foundation of a “missionary culture.” According to Limp, 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 shine 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.

He is now trying to install Amazon’s customer focus as a key part of Blue Origin. While Blue’s customers – like NASA, ULA and suborbital astronauts – are quite different from the consumers Limp used to focus on, its message to Blue employees is to make its customers happy top priority.

“Even though technology is really nice and fun… the customer has to be at the forefront,” Limp said.

To further evolve Blue’s culture, Limp highlighted a number of key leadership additions: Allen Parker as CFO after holding financial leadership roles at Zillow and Amazon; Jennifer Pena-Leanos as chief human resources officer, after leading human resources on Limp’s former Amazon Devices team; Ian Richardson as senior vice president of manufacturing operations after a long tenure as SpaceX director of production; and Tim Collins as vice president of global supply chain after leading global operations for Flexport and Amazon.

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

“You can walk into a factory and know when it’s working well and when it’s not,” he said. “It doesn’t matter how much capital expenditure you put in, 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 and 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 Tell Me There’s a Chance.” No company has achieved a first-time landing with an orbital rocket booster, and New Glenn will aim for a 200-foot-wide platform on a ship named Jacklyn in the Atlantic Ocean.

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

It seems almost inevitable that New Glenn’s future involves a starship crew, 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 Starliner suffered another setback this summer.

But Limp deferred when asked about the development of a New Glenn crew capsule: “Nothing to say about that.”

Blue Origin has gained experience in the suborbital and low-risk realm of human spaceflight with its New Shepard rocket and capsule. Limp noted that Blue Origin is working to return “New Shepard” to a regular flight cadence, carrying both crew and research cargo.

He has flown two New Shepard missions this year and is I’m aiming for a third next week.. That mission will also include a new rocket booster and capsule to add a second vehicle “to better meet growing customer demand,” the company said, after losing a booster during a cargo flight failure in September 2022.

Beyond New Glenn and engine production, Blue’s is still making progress: Last year, it won a $3.4 billion contract with NASA to build a lunar lander for astronauts on Earth. agency. In the spring, Blue was integrated into the Pentagon’s lucrative National Security Space Launch Program, a turnaround after missing the previous phase of the NSSL in 2020.

As for Limp, he devotes his time to “a short round trip between” Blue Origin facilities every 2 and a half weeks. He travels from his headquarters in Seattle, meets with customers in Washington, D.C., sees engine production and testing in Huntsville, Alabama, and finally checks in on 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 business we love and make decisions quickly, knowing we will make mistakes. But let’s not make the same mistakes and fix them quickly,” Limp said.