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

When Dave Limp interviewed Jeff Bezos, CEO of the billionaire space company Blue Origin, last year, he asked just one question.

“Jeff, is Blue Origin a hobby or a business?” Limp asked.

After 14 years as a senior Amazon As an executive, Limp told CNBC that he made it clear to Bezos that he was not interested in leading Blue Origin if the nearly 25-year-old business had no intention of becoming a serious company.

“I don’t know how to run a hobby,” Limp said, adding, “If it’s a hobby, then it’s not for me.”

But he said Bezos firmly believed Blue Origin needed to become a business.

Limp admits that Bezos convinced him to turn to space. “My initial reaction was: This isn’t for me because I’m not an aerospace engineer,” he said. But he decided to take a step of faith.

“Jeff thought (Blue Origin) needed manufacturing expertise; it needed decisiveness; it needed a little bit of energy,” Limp said.

Limp has been CEO of Blue Origin for nine months and counting. He takes over from former leadership, which broadly expanded the company’s workforce and infrastructure but fell years behind on several major projects and lost out on key government contracts.

Blue Origin has been flying tourists and researchers to the edge of space on excursions for years, including Bezos himself. Bezos has spent billions of dollars each year over the past two decades to build Blue Origin into a space giant. The company’s projects range from rockets and spacecraft to space stations and lunar landers.

In the industry stakes of orbital missions, however, Blue Origin has yet to enter the serious rocket game, as the U.S. launch market is still dominated by SpaceX, followed by United Launch Alliance, rocket lab and Firefly Aerospace.

But the company says it’s closer than ever to the long-awaited debut of its New Glenn rocket. The launch vehicle is about 320 feet tall and is said to be able to lift 45,000 kilograms (or more than 99,000 pounds) into low-Earth orbit, twice as much as SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9 rocket.

Like the Falcon 9, New Glenn is designed to be partially reusable. Blue Origin aims to return and land the rocket’s booster, its largest and most valuable part, to unlock what SpaceX claims is the rocket’s cost and time efficiencies.

New Glenn’s first launch attempt is scheduled for November. Blue Origin is in the final stages of integration, including conducting Recent critical test firing of rocket upper stage last month.

Initially, the company aimed to achieve the audacious feat of flying to Mars on NASA’s ESCAPADE mission when New Glenn debuted. But as the launch window shortened, the agency postponed ESCAPADE to a later launch time. Blue Origin will conduct flight demonstrations of its spacecraft at the site of the mission blue ring New Glenn launches for the first time.

Headquartered in Kent, Washington, a suburb of Seattle, Blue Origin has more than 10,000 employees in the region and six other key locations across the country, including industry heavyweights such as Texas, Florida and Alabama. Limp admits that Blue Origin has “been in the R&D stage for a long time,” an aspect of the company’s culture he’s trying to change.

“We’re very, very good at building shiny factories, and we’re very good at building high-fidelity prototypes. Some of these prototypes are even able to fly…but that’s not where we want to scale up and become a world-class manufacturer,” Limp said.

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

But he said he saw genuine excitement among Blue employees about the space, calling that enthusiasm the foundation of a “missionary culture.” In Limp’s view, Amazon’s customer-centric principles drive the technology giant’s culture, but Amazon does not have “a strong mission for Blue’s existence.”

“People’s eyes lit up. They’ve been thinking about space since they were kids, they’ve always wanted to work in the space industry, and now they’re working in space at Blue,” Limp said.

Now, he’s trying to make Amazon’s customer-centric philosophy a key part of Blue Origin. While Blue’s customers (such as NASA, ULA and suborbital astronauts) are very different from the consumers Limp has focused on in the past, his message to Blue employees is that serving customers is a top priority.

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

To further transform Blue’s culture, Limp highlighted some key leadership additions: Allen Parker, who previously held executive finance roles at Zillow and Amazon, as chief financial officer; Jennifer Pena-Leanos, chief people officer, who previously held executive finance roles at Zillow and Amazon; The equipment team leads human resources; Ian Richardson serves as senior vice president of manufacturing operations after serving as a long-time director of production at SpaceX; Tim Collins, who previously led global operations for Flexport and Amazon, currently serves as global Vice President of Supply Chain.

Limp also made some changes, moving more of the company’s employees onto the factory floor.

“You can walk into a factory and know when it’s working well and when it’s not working well,” he said. “If you don’t use them in the right way, it doesn’t matter how much capital expenditure you put in, what kind of machinery you have. It’s like having a shiny new car just sitting in the driveway – where’s the fun in that?” ?

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

Perhaps more optimistically, Blue aims to launch New Glenn for the first time, cheekily naming the booster So You Told Me There Was a Chance. No company has been able to achieve a landing on the first attempt using an orbital rocket booster, and New Glenn aims to build one on a 200-foot-wide platform A ship named Jacklyn in the Atlantic Ocean.

“It’s going to be risky. It’s going to 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 behind us. We’re going to build more,” Limp said.

New Glenn’s future seems inevitable to involve crewed spacecraft – especially given Blue’s long-term mission: “We envision millions of people living and working in space for the benefit of the planet.” For now, only SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft has been certified by NASA and can carry astronauts to and from orbit after launch. Boeing’s Starliner suffered another setback this summer.

But when asked about the development of the New Glenn capsule, Limp hesitated: “There’s not much to say about that.”

Blue Origin has experience in the low-risk suborbital realm of human spaceflight with its New Shepard rocket and capsule. Limp pointed out that Blue Origin is working hard to return the “New Shepard” to a normal flight rhythm to transport crew members and research cargo.

It completed two New Shepard missions this year and is Aiming for third time next week. The mission will also feature new rocket boosters and capsules to add a second vehicle “to better meet growing customer demand,” the company said following a cargo flight failure in September 2022. Lost the booster.

Beyond New Glenn and engine production, Blue has made more progress: Last year, it won a $3.4 billion NASA contract to build a lunar lander for the agency’s astronauts. This spring, Blue joined the Pentagon’s lucrative National Security Space Launch Program, reversing a miss from the previous phase of the NSSL in 2020.

As for Limp, he spends “a round trip” between Blue Origin facilities every 2.5 weeks. From the Seattle headquarters, he traveled to Washington, D.C., to meet with customers, visit engine production and testing in Huntsville, Alabama, and finally inspect New Glenn operations in Cape Canaveral, Texas. It’s all part of his interest in leading a proper space company, not a billionaire hobby.

“Let’s build a business we love with financial discipline, let’s make decisions quickly, knowing we’re going to make some mistakes. But let’s not make the same mistakes, let’s correct them as quickly as possible,” Limp said.