During the middle of the 2010s, after more than a decade of near silence, Blue Origin emerged from stealth mode with all appearances of becoming a formidable space company. It seemed probable that two titans of the tech industry, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, would now battle for supremacy in the space arena.
In late 2014, Blue Origin stunned the space industry by announcing that it had reached a deal to build rocket engines for United Launch Alliance, then the premiere launch company in the United States. United Launch Alliance selected Blue’s BE-4 engine for its new Vulcan rocket over an offering from Aerojet Rocketdyne, the blueblood propulsion company behind the majority of large rocket engines in US history.
About a year later, Blue Origin pulled off another feat by safely launching and landing the New Shepard rocket and capsule on its up-and-down suborbital mission. This marked the first time in history that anyone—country or company—had vertically launched a first-stage rocket into space and then landed it back on the ground.
The next month, in December 2015, SpaceX repeated this launch-and-landing feat with its orbital Falcon 9 rocket for the first time. From a technical standpoint, the Falcon 9 landing was much more significant, as it requires about 30 times more energy to boost a payload into orbit and complicated engineering to slow such a booster down and return it to the landing site. No matter: After the Falcon 9 flight, Jeff Bezos cheekily tweeted, “Welcome to the club” to Musk and SpaceX.
Musk was decidedly not amused, but this banter underscored the emerging rivalry—Bezos and Musk, billionaire versus billionaire, on a quest to build reusable rockets and remake the space industry. Back then, it all seemed so clear: The 21st-century space race would be run by Blue Origin and SpaceX, and it was going to be a hell of a thing to watch.
Only it hasn’t been. There has been no race. Since the end of 2015, Blue Origin has launched its suborbital New Shepard system just 15 more times, an average of fewer than three missions per year. Only this week did humans finally get on board for a launch. As for the BE-4 engine, after promising it would be ready for spaceflight in 2017, Blue Origin has yet to deliver a flight-ready version to United Launch Alliance more than four years later.
SpaceX, by contrast, has ascended. Since December 2015, the company has successfully flown more than 100 orbital missions. It has developed and flown the world’s most powerful rocket, the Falcon Heavy, and may soon debut its still more titanic Starship launch system. With the Starlink Internet constellation, SpaceX now operates more satellites than any nation or company in the world. And in 2020, thanks to SpaceX, NASA broke its dependency on Russia for human spaceflight. NASA astronauts now ride to space in style inside the sleek Crew Dragon spacecraft.
Blue Origin has also lost out when it comes to large government contracts worth billions of dollars, something Bezos craves as he seeks to find some return on his massive investment in Blue Origin. In 2020, the Department of Defense said it would only allow United Launch Alliance and SpaceX to bid on national security launch contracts in the mid-2020s. Blue Origin protested and lost. Then, in April, NASA chose SpaceX alone for a prestigious Human Landing System. This came after Bezos showily unveiled his company’s “Blue Moon” lander in 2019. Blue Origin protested this, too, and a decision is expected in early August. It would come as a surprise if Blue Origin succeeds.
In short, a once-promising space race has become something of a damp squib. In late 2019, while reporting for my book on the origins of SpaceX, Liftoff, I asked Musk why he thought Blue Origin had fallen behind. “Bezos is not great at engineering, to be frank," Musk replied.
In recent years, Blue Origin has kept on building things. In 2017, Blue Origin said it would invest $200 million to build a BE-4 rocket engine factory in Northern Alabama. Later that year, the company said it had nearly completed construction of a massive manufacturing factory in Florida for its New Glenn rocket. Blue Origin has also expanded its factory in Washington.
All told, Blue Origin now has millions of square feet of facilities. Currently, it just has precious little rocket hardware. For all of its construction efforts, Blue Origin has yet to deliver a BE-4 engine to United Launch Alliance. And the massive New Glenn rocket, about which Bezos has been talking for a decade, remains at least a couple of years away from its first flight.
The industry has taken notice, with popular memes such as United Launch Alliance chief Tory Bruno repeatedly asking, “Jeff, where are my engines?” Others show the huge New Glenn factory in Florida, which appears to be mostly empty.
As Blue Origin has fallen behind SpaceX in recent years, morale has declined, according to multiple sources. Bezos pushed the company further from its roots in late 2017 by sidelining long-time president Rob Meyerson and hiring a traditional aerospace veteran, Bob Smith, to become chief executive. Coming from Honeywell, Smith instituted a more bureaucratic management style, and Blue Origin’s progress seemed to slow significantly. Whereas Bezos' debut flight on New Shepard could have occurred as early as 2019, it slipped by months and eventually years. Critics of Smith’s plodding management style started referring to the company as “Blue Honeywell.”
The decline in morale at Blue Origin coincided with a period when Bezos was increasingly distracted by making visits to Hollywood for Amazon Prime video, the assassination of Saudi writer Jamal Khashoggi (who worked for the Washington Post), a divorce from his wife MacKenzie, and more. He spent less time at the rocket company, and it suffered as a result.
The question is, now that Bezos has tasted spaceflight, will he become reinvigorated and pursue his ambitions with abandon?
“Losing to SpaceX cannot please him,” said Brad Stone, author of Amazon Unbound, a new book about Bezos and his retail empire. “What we know about Jeff Bezos is that he doesn’t like losing.”
However, Stone is not sure Bezos will take a strong hand at Blue Origin. Although Bezos seeded the company with principles, he also seeded dysfunction by installing a very different leader in Smith. Since 2017, Bezos has more or less let Smith run Blue Origin with freedom, and he may continue to do so. “It’s hard for me to see Bezos taking on a more prominent executive role at Blue Origin,” Stone said.
If Bezos thinks about this or reflects on how Blue Origin has so far fallen short of SpaceX, he does not talk about it publicly. Two moments on Tuesday, after his historic spaceflight, suggest he may not do a whole lot about it regardless.
Two hours after Bezos and his fellow passengers landed, they climbed onto a stage near the launch pad to receive their “astronaut” wings. The event, billed as a “press conference,” instead saw Blue Origin’s Ariane Cornell ask softball questions about the flight. The answers were interesting, and Bezos obviously took deep satisfaction from the event. At one point, he removed a necklace he had worn during the flight, got down from the stage, and put it around his mother’s neck. It seemed to be his way of telling his mom he had fulfilled his childhood dreams.
After all of that, Bezos allowed for just three actual press questions to be asked. Two came from TV networks and the other from Reuters. Only one of the questions got near the troubles at Blue Origin, asking about timelines for future rocket development. Bezos simply didn’t answer the question. He welcomes no public scrutiny of Blue Origin, and in doing so, he only invites more.
After the sham “press conference,” the four newly minted astronauts drove over to the landing site where the New Shepard rocket landed. It looked sooty and slightly worn in the midday sunshine, but it was no less brilliant for the wear-and-tear. New Shepard is a fine piece of engineering and a reasonable place for a launch company to start learning about spaceflight. The problem is that by beginning his company with a focus on space tourism and flying on the very first mission himself, Bezos only plays into the hands of critics. They might easily say Blue Origin is all about Bezos gratifying his spaceflight ambitions or about allowing a handful of wealthy tourists to reach a high-altitude vantage point for looking down on commoners.
With New Shepard in the background, Bezos and the blue flight suit-clad astronauts posed for photographs. Near the end of the photo session, Bezos called out, “Hey Bob, come here. You should be in the photo, too.” At this invitation, a smiling Bob Smith emerged from a small group of onlookers and stood in the middle of the four people who had just gone into space. Cameras clicked.
This gesture by Bezos hardly seemed to be that of someone dissatisfied with the CEO of his rocket company.
After the photo opportunity, Bezos climbed behind the wheel of his Rivian truck and drove right onto the landing site, making a circle around the rocket, before roaring off into the hazy desert, bound for points unknown. Kind of like his rocket company.
Source
EPT
