Jeff Bezos speaks in front of a model of Blue Origin’s lunar lander in 2019 in Washington.
Associated Press
IN In 2021, Elon Musk trolled Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, mocking his rival’s slow progress toward launching a rocket into space. “Can’t get it (into orbit) lol,” he has written on Twitter.
Now, almost 25 years after Bezos started the company, Blue Origin is on the brink of applause. Its powerful New Glenn rocket is at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center for its inaugural launch, which could come as early as Sunday morning.
Many in the space industry and government are cheering for it to succeed — and end SpaceX’s near-monopoly on putting U.S. satellites into orbit.
“The space industry likes to have choices,” said Caleb Henry, an analyst at Quilty Space. “And it doesn’t have that today. It just has SpaceX.”
And Blue Origin is selling the launches at a price per satellite that is significantly better than SpaceX, a former employee said. Forbes.
The launch effort comes less than two weeks before Donald Trump returns to the White House. During his first term, the former president attacked Bezos for negative coverage in the Washington Post, which Bezos owns. Now Trump, with Musk at his right, is promising a shift in government spending and regulations that could tilt the playing field for the commercial space industry — and threaten some of Blue Origin’s government contracts.
ANIMAL SPIRITS
Bezos has positioned Blue Origin as the slow, steady alternative to SpaceX’s “move fast, fail fast” ethos. Its motto is “gradatim ferociter”, Latin for “step by step, ferociously”, and its logo features two turtles. So far, the tortoise has been soundly beaten by SpaceX’s rabbit.
Over the past decade, SpaceX increased its launch cadence to unprecedented levels, while its competition was largely sidelined. The old space launch heavyweights — United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin, and Europe’s Arianespace — struggled with delays in developing new rockets and Western sanctions removed Russian rockets as an option. SpaceX’s Falcon rockets carried cargo into orbit 133 times in 2024, with one failure, the vast majority of the 145 launches attempted in the US last year and more than half of the 263 worldwide, according to space activity tracker Jonathan McDowell.
But New Glenn, first announced in 2016, promises to be a tough competitor. Like SpaceX’s Falcon 9, it’s a two-stage heavy-lift workhorse, with the first stage designed to return to earth for reuse. But according to Blue Origin, a larger nose cone gives New Glenn twice the payload volume of the Falcon 9, and its powerful engines are designed to push twice the payload mass.
And Blue Origin is setting the price to give customers more bang for their buck than SpaceX, according to a former employee who now works for a competitor who spoke to Forbes on condition of anonymity.
Blue Origin is paying roughly $110 million per launch, he said, compared to about $70 million for a Falcon 9 — effectively offering to carry twice as many satellites for roughly 50% more money.
Blue Origin did not respond to a request for comment from Forbes.
Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket, which is 32 stories tall and designed to launch 45 tons of payload into orbit, is pictured during a hot-fire test at Cape Canaveral, Fla., on Dec. 27.
Blue origin
New Glenn is already proving attractive to companies building large constellations of small satellites for low-Earth orbit, especially as those satellites have gotten bigger, Henry said.
Blue Origin has won contracts to use it to launch satellites for all major constellations except, of course, SpaceX’s Starlink. This includes AST Mobile, which is developing a network to provide mobile service from space. The company has said that New Glenn can carry eight of its Block 2 satellites, which will be the largest yet placed in low Earth orbit. The Falcon 9 can only hold four..
And Bezos’ Amazon.com is leaning heavily on Blue Origin to carry out its plans for its Kuiper satellite network. Blue Origin is slated to release at least 23% of the constellation and potentially as much as half. Amazon expects to pay Blue Origin $2.7 billion by 2028, it said in a financial filing last year.
The US government is also eager for another opportunity to launch its intelligence and communications satellites. In June, the Defense Department selected Blue Origin, along with SpaceX and United Launch Alliance, to compete for launches worth up to $5.6 billion through 2029.
CASH out
It’s a welcome return after years of heavy spending to build the company. On the New Glenn program alone, Blue Origin has spent about $10 billion, the former employee estimated. Aside from some NASA contracts, that money has come from the deep pockets of Bezos, who has vowed to use the vast fortune he made from Amazon to pursue his childhood space dreams. Forbes estimates his net worth at $233 billion, a distant second in the world to Musk’s $416 billion.
While it took Blue Origin a quarter of a century to make its first shot at space, it has made impressive achievements along the way as it builds infrastructure for the massive rocket launches that SpaceX puts together only gradually once it reaches orbit. The company developed a powerful rocket engine, the Be-4, which enabled two successful launches of United Launch Alliance’s new Vulcan rocket. With its reusable New Shepard rocket, which is designed to bring tourists to the edge of space, Blue Origin has become the only rocket company other than SpaceX to achieve the trick of landing its first stage. And it has built manufacturing facilities expected to produce over 100 Be-4 engines by 2025, and multiple boosters to support a pace of 12 launches a year.
“It’s easy to say, ‘SpaceX has done so much and Blue Origin has done so little,’ but it’s nuanced,” said Carissa Christensen, CEO of space consulting firm BryceTech.
A successful launch would be powerful validation for Blue Origin, but the effort comes against a murky political backdrop. Trump has tasked Musk with leading an effort to cut government spending and regulation. A relaxation of rules in the highly regulated space industry would help everyone involved, but competitors fear preferential treatment for SpaceX.
Exhibit A: Trump’s nominee to run NASA, billionaire Jared Isaacman. His company Shift4 Payments has invested in SpaceX, and Isaacman has funded two private space flights on Falcon rockets.
Last March, Isaacman questioned the wisdom of NASA’s decision to fund the development of redundant lunar landers by SpaceX and Blue Origin in case one were to fail.
But Bezos has expressed confidence that Musk will not use his influence in the Trump administration to benefit SpaceX at the expense of Blue Origin.
“I accept what has been said, which is what it is [Musk] will not use his political power to benefit his companies or to disadvantage his competitors,” Bezos said in December at a New York Times conference.
Bezos, in any case, is looking well beyond the next four years. He wants Blue Origin to drive the creation of an off-world economy where manufacturing and mining take place in space, and “Earth will be zoned for housing and light industry.” One day he thinks that will make Blue Origin a bigger business than Amazon, he said in the Times event. But it’s all based on lowering the cost of getting into space, starting with New Glenn.
“We know how to travel in space. We know how to land on the moon. We should be able to do it a hundred times cheaper,” Bezos told space YouTuber Tim Dodd in September. “This is what will truly open the heavens to mankind.”
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