The Blue Origin coat of arms. Image source: Inverse.
Within a few days, a privately held space transportation enterprise, owned by one of the richest people in the world, will attempt to make history by launching and landing one of the world’s most powerful rockets.
No, not the “X” company.
Blue Origin was founded in 2000 by tech entrepreneur Jeff Bezos, who made his fortune from e-commerce website Amazon.com. Time magazine named Bezos its 1999 Person of the Year for the “seismic shift” he had created in the economy. Time called Amazon “the point of reference for anyone who had anything to sell online.”
In parallel, Elon Musk had co-founded an online financial services company he called X.com, which in March 2000 merged with startup Confinity, a company that had created a “digital wallet” called PayPal. Musk was the largest shareholder of the new company. Elon wasn’t with PayPal long — he was forced out as CEO and replaced with Peter Thiel — but made a fortune when the company went public and then was sold to eBay.
Bezos and Musk had commercial space visions, but differing interests. Jeff was his class valedictorian at Miami Palmetto Senior High School in Miami, Florida. He spoke of creating space colonies, moving industry out into space so Earth could become a paradise. Bezos was inspired by physicist Dr. Gerard K. O’Neill, who had articulated a vision of rotating space habitats that came to be known as O’Neill cylinders.
Dr. Gerard K. O’Neill and futurist author Dr. Isaac Asimov appear on WNET’s “The Roundtable” in 1975. Video source: SSI: Space Studies Institute YouTube channel.
Musk was more interested in making humanity a multiplanetary species. He too had childhood visions of space travel, but his interests fixated on Mars. In mid-2001, Elon met with Mars Society founder Robert Zubrin; Musk joined its board of directors and donated $100,000 to fund a desert research station.
SpaceX came out of Musk’s plans to launch a robotic greenhouse to Mars that transmitted video to Earth so people could see life growing on another planet. Elon travelled with a small entourage (among them was future NASA administrator Michael Griffin) to Moscow, hoping to acquire an intercontinental ballistic missile to launch his payload. Treated poorly by the Russians, Musk decided to start his own launch company.
Musk has always been in a rush, but Bezos has not.
The Wayback Machine’s earliest archive of Blue’s website is January 18, 2002, showing a home page with nothing more than a graphic. A May 28, 2003 archive shows the page updated with a description:
Blue Origin LLC was created to research spacecraft and launch systems with the ultimate goal of contributing to an enduring human presence in space. Research at Blue Origin today is primarily focused on identifying and developing ideas that will improve the safety and decrease the cost of getting into space.
It also had a link for a jobs page.
You must have a genuine passion for space. Without passion, you will find what we're trying to do too difficult. There are much easier jobs.
You must want to work in a small company. If you can happily work at a large aerospace company, you're probably not the right person.
Our hiring bar is unabashedly extreme. We insist on keeping our team size small (measured in the dozens), which means each person occupying a spot must be among the most technically gifted in his or her field.
We are building real hardware -- not PowerPoint presentations. This must excite you. You must be a builder.
Newsweek published an article on May 4, 2003 reporting on the small secretive company. “There's no record of the company in the city's phone books, and its workers will tell their neighbors only that the firm pursues scientific research. But the databases of the state of Washington offer more tantalizing clues.”
NEWSWEEK has learned that Bezos created Blue Origin, also known as Blue Operations LLC, to pursue his fervent dream of establishing an enduring human presence in space.
The company was working towards “launching a reusable space vehicle into suborbital space, with seven tourists onboard, in the next few years.” The vehicle would be called New Shepard, after Alan Shepard, the first US astronaut into space, who had made a 15-minute suborbital flight from Cape Canaveral in May 1961.
Blue Origin’s competition seemed more likely to come from suborbital tourist ventures such as Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic and other startups announced that decade. SpaceX saw suborbital as a testing ground for its bigger rockets and ambitions.
Despite the occasional jabs between Musk and Bezos, each company largely minded its own business.1 Blue quietly began work on an orbital launch vehicle, called New Glenn after John Glenn who in 1962 was the first US astronaut to orbit Earth. New Shepard’s booster was powered by a liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen fueled engine called the BE-3, but New Glenn would be powered by a liquid oxygen and liquid methane engine called BE-4. Both SpaceX with its Raptor engine and Blue Origin with its BE-4 moved to liquid methane as a fuel because methane burns cleaner than the old standard RP-1 kerosene, making reusability simpler.
In Septmber 2018, United Launch Alliance announced that it would use Blue’s BE-4 engines on its new booster, called Vulcan. BE-4 delays became a failure point on Vulcan’s critical path; the first Vulcan flight didn’t launch until January 8, 2024.
The first ULA Vulcan launch, on January 8, 2024. Liftoff is roughly at the 52:30 mark. Video source: United Launch Alliance YouTube channel.
Blue, meanwhile, began establishing its own presence at Cape Canaveral. On September 15, 2015, Space Florida hosted an event welcoming Blue to the Cape’s Launch Complex 36. The state agency formed a public-private partnership with Blue Origin, contributing $26.4 million to help convert the old Atlas-Centaur launch site. In 2016, Blue broke ground on a manufacturing complex at Space Florida’s Exploration Park on Space Commerce Way in north Merritt Island. The New Glenns will be built at the factory, then taken on a circuitous route to LC-36.
The Space Florida event on September 15, 2015 welcoming Blue Origin to Launch Complex 36. Video source: Space SPAN YouTube channel.
Bezos announced New Glenn on September 12, 2016. More than eight years have passed. In that time, SpaceX became the dominant launch provider, not only in the United States but also in the world. New Glenn is intended to land on a seafaring platform as the SpaceX Falcon 9 does, but Blue has yet to demonstrate that capability, while SpaceX has perfected it.
As of this writing, it appears that New Glenn is now scheduled for its first test flight early in the morning of Wednesday, January 8. Blue’s recovery ship, Jacklyn, has departed Port Canaveral for an undisclosed ocean destination. It took SpaceX years to successfully achieve a landing, much less an ocean landing. Blue apparently will attempt one on New Glenn’s maiden flight.
Blue Origin’s motto is Graditim ferociter, Latin for gradually and fiercely. (Blue translates it as, “Step by step, ferociously.” Blue is the tortoise to the SpaceX hare. Elon Musk acts as if he’s in a race against time. Jeff Bezos is focused on the objective, not how fast he gets there.
Many, including this author, hope that Blue emerges as a worthy competitor. SpaceX is on critical paths throughout the government, both NASA and the Pentagon. Elon Musk’s mercurial behavior, coupled with his spending $277 millon to back Donald Trump and other Republican candidates, has many worried that the incoming Trump administration will do Musk’s bidding rather than what’s right for the country. The Washington Post reported on December 19, 2024 that Musk joined Trump and Bezos at Mar-a-Lago for a private dinner. Trump has feuded at times with Bezos, especially over the Post’s coverage of Trump. Bezos owns the newspaper.
The next generation of launch vehicles appears to be the SpaceX Starship, the ULA Vulcan, and the Blue Origin New Glenn. SpaceX and Blue are privately owned by billionaire tech entrepreneurs who can do with their money what they want. ULA is owned by a partnership of Boeing and Lockheed Martin, two publicly traded corporations, accountable to shareholders who expect quarterly profits.
Rumors suggested a year ago that ULA was about to be sold to Blue Origin, but that never happened. Another rumor surfaced in August that ULA was to be sold to Sierra Space, but that hasn’t happened either. It’s hard to foresee a viable business model for Vulcan. The booster was supposedly designed to be partially reusable — with its engines recovered by parachute, while the rest of the fuselage expended — but that capability has yet to be demonstrated.
If you’re looking for a space savior, your best chance is with Blue Origin. Jeff Bezos isn’t fond of unions any more than Elon Musk is. Progressives will find plenty other reasons to complain about Jeff too. Setting aside political leanings, if you want to take Elon Musk and SpaceX out of the American space critical path, Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin are — for now — your only viable option.
A New Glenn failure on its maiden flight is entirely possible. Perhaps likely. It wouldn’t be the first time a rocket failed on its inaugural test launch. The SpaceX Starship has launched six times starting in April 2023, and has yet to successfully achieve all its mission objectives. But they understand that such tests are used to gather data that help them learn on-the-fly, so to speak, so they can go faster. That’s why they dominate the launch market.
Should New Glenn fail, it’s likely that graditim ferociter will apply. They’ll study, they’ll learn, and they’ll launch when they’re ready.
An April 2023 Blue Origin video depicting the company’s vision. Video source: Blue Origin YouTube channel.
In September 2013, Blue Origin formally protested NASA awarding SpaceX a lease of Kennedy Space Center’s Pad 39A. The protest failed.