Blue Origin’s motto is “Gradatim Ferociter!,” which is Latin for “step by step, ferociously!” The company’s mascot is a tortoise.
In the early years, it operated shrouded in secrecy. It started with its small, suborbital New Shepard rocket and capsule to build up experience with hydrogen engines and landing reusable vehicles.
It was a well-thought-out, step-by-step progression. And it took time to carry out each step.
An old joke goes, “How does one make a small fortune in the rocket business?”
Punchline: “Start with a big fortune.”
Jeff Bezos, who became one of the richest people in the world as the founder of Amazon, is perhaps the best example demonstrating the joke’s premise, that rockets are a quick and easy way to lose a lot of money.
Mr. Bezos started Blue Origin two years before Elon Musk founded SpaceX, and Mr. Musk was then a relative pauper, falling well short of billionaire status.
Since then, Mr. Bezos has poured billions of dollars of his personal wealth into Blue Origin, which has yet not launched its first rocket to orbit, while SpaceX has become the world’s top rocket company.
Perhaps because of Mr. Bezos’ money, Blue Origin took a slower and steadier approach than SpaceX, more similar to traditional aerospace companies like United Launch Alliance and Northrop Grumman.
Mr. Musk did not have Mr. Bezos’ unlimited money, and SpaceX did not have the luxury of time. It had to be scrappy, nimble and bet big on itself.
Even as SpaceX’s first three attempts to launch its small Falcon 1 rocket failed, it persuaded NASA that it could successfully develop a much larger Falcon 9 rocket to take cargo to the International Space Station.
With the three failures, SpaceX was almost out of money. Mr. Musk’s other company, the electric car maker Tesla, was also in danger of going under, and he was personally almost broke.
SpaceX scraped together enough spare parts for a fourth Falcon 1. If that failed, SpaceX would have died, another entry on a long list of forgotten space companies. But the fourth launch made it to orbit.
The traditional aerospace giants all possessed talented engineers and deep knowledge and experience.
They could have also made big bets to slash the cost of launches and disrupt the rocket business. But they did not try, concluding that the technical and financial risks were too great, and they were already making healthy profits.
Engineers at United Launch Alliance, for example, had looked at the prospects of landing and reusing the booster stages of its rockets, just as SpaceX now does with Falcon 9.
But with the small number of launches that U.L.A. was conducting each year, it seemed to be a pointless, money-losing endeavor, and the idea was filed away.
That is analogous to how Intel passed on an opportunity in 2006 to make the processors for Apple’s first iPhones. In the short run, Intel calculated that there was no way doing so would have been profitable.
Similarly, the other rocket companies did not expect that cheaper launch costs would bring in enough new customers to make it worth the trouble. SpaceX did, and transformed the business of traveling to space.
Perhaps more significantly, Mr. Musk realized that he could take advantage of the lower costs of the Falcon 9 to deploy a constellation of thousands of internet satellites — another business idea that had eluded profitability for other companies, notably Motorola’s Iridium satellites in the late 1990s.
Blue Origin appears to be picking up its pace now. In December 2023, in an interview with a podcaster, Lex Fridman, Mr. Bezos said he had left his position as chief executive of Amazon to add energy and urgency to Blue Origin, “We need to move much faster,” he said during the podcast. “And we’re going to.”
That month, Dave Limp, a longtime Amazon executive who was in charge of the consumer electronics division that includes the Echo smart speakers and Kindle e-readers, became chief executive of Blue Origin.
He, too, has talked of making the company more nimble and decisive “Maybe what we were doing was seeking perfection in a lot of things,” he said in an interview last year.
Taking a little more risk “makes you move much, much faster,” he said.
Mr. Bezos recently said he expected Blue Origin would eventually make more money than Amazon. Like SpaceX, the company is envisioning New Glenn not as a rocket just to launch satellites for customers. It sees the vehicle as a foundational instrument to undergird other space ventures including lunar landers and orbiting space stations.
