The Economist: Can Jeff Bezos match Elon Musk in space?

It has been a long time coming. Assuming there are no last-minute delays, then in the next few days Blue Origin, a firm run by Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder, will make the first launch of its New Glenn rocket from Cape Canaveral in Florida. If everything goes smoothly, then almost a quarter of a century after it was founded, Blue Origin will reach orbit for the first time — and the private space industry may have another contender.

That is quite a big “if”. Getting all the way to orbit with a brand-new rocket is a rare feat. Blue Origin also hopes to recover the rocket’s first stage by landing it on a drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean. Doing that on a maiden flight would be unprecedented: that kind of partial reusability was pioneered by SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocket firm, and it required several attempts before eventually sticking the landing in 2016. (In a nod to those long odds, Blue Origin has named the booster So You’re Telling Me There’s A Chance.)

Admittedly, Blue Origin will not be starting entirely from scratch. Since 2021 the firm has been flying tourists (including Mr Bezos himself) above the Karman Line, the 100km boundary that marks the edge of space. The New Shepard rockets that power those missions are capable of landing for later re-use. But going into orbit is much harder than crossing the Karman Line. It requires not only flying much higher, but also accelerating sideways to around 28,000 kilometres per hour.

New Glenn is, therefore, far bigger and more capable than New Shepard (see diagram). At 98 metres tall it is just two metres shy of one commonly used definition of a skyscraper. Only three rockets currently flying—SpaceX’s Starship and Falcon Heavy vehicles, and NASA’s Space Launch System — produce more thrust. New Glenn is designed to carry 45 tonnes to orbit, roughly double the capacity of SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9.

But amid all the excitement, many observers will be wondering what has taken Blue Origin so long. The firm’s motto is gradatim ferociter, or “step by step, ferociously.” In contrast to Mr Bezos’s hard-charging management style at Amazon, at Blue Origin the gradatim has been much more visible than the ferociter. The firm was established in 2000. Contemporaries such as SpaceX (founded in 2002) or Rocket Lab (2006) have been flying to orbit for years — more than 400 times in SpaceX’s case, which has established itself as the planet’s most capable space organisation.

The problem is not lack of ambition on its owner’s part. In 2019, two years before he stepped down as Amazon’s CEO, Mr Bezos gave a presentation advocating the construction of giant space-going cities, of the sort proposed by Gerard O’Neill, an American physicist, in the 1970s. (Mr Bezos went to Princeton University, the institution where O’Neill taught.)

Moving humans and their industry off Earth, said Mr Bezos, would allow the population to grow to a trillion people. That would mean “a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins”, he said in 2023, and allow Earth to be run mostly as a nature reserve. Blue Origin was founded to provide the cheap access to space necessary to make that idea a reality.

The tortoise and the hare

One reason for the subsequent slow progress might have been that Mr Bezos was too busy with his day job at Amazon to pay close attention to his rocket company. Many of the managers he hired to run Blue Origin were from the sleepy “Old Space” establishment. “Blue Origin’s approach was to say ‘We’ll hire the best in the business’,” says Simon Potter at BryceTech, a firm of analysts. SpaceX, he says, “started from the assumption that the whole (aerospace) business was broken anyway”, and so did things its own way.

Caleb Henry of Quilty Space, another firm of analysts, thinks Blue Origin might have been too well-funded for its own good. Mr Bezos was already a billionaire when he founded the firm, and has made regular donations over the years. By contrast Mr Musk had to run SpaceX on a comparative shoestring, at least at first, with the firm almost going bust in 2008. Even now, says Mr Henry, SpaceX retains a scrappy, high-pressure start-up culture. “I think the work-life balance at Blue Origin is attractive to many people,” he says. But it has perhaps meant less progress than the boss would have liked.

Mr Bezos himself has admitted that Blue Origin has been too slow, and has said he quit as Amazon’s chief executive partly to speed things up. In 2023 Bob Smith, Blue Origin’s CEO, was replaced by Dave Limp, an Amazon executive.

Mr Limp has been trying to inject some vim and urgency. A much-delayed contract for Blue Origin to supply engines for the Vulcan-Centaur rocket operated by United Launch Alliance (ULA), a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin, seems at last to be running smoothly. And, on paper at least, Blue Origin’s plans for New Glenn are now ferocious indeed. “They are talking about maybe ten launches (in 2025) and 24 the year after,” says Mr Henry. That kind of ramp-up for a new rocket is, he says, “simply unheard-of”.

Assuming New Glenn makes it into space, one question will be whether it can take some market share from SpaceX’s cheap and reliable Falcon 9, which dominates the commercial-launch business. Blue Origin has not disclosed pricing, but one industry-watcher talks of seeing a contract that put a launch at $US68m ($110m). That is roughly the same as a Falcon 9, despite New Glenn offering double the payload.

The firm already has a minimum of one customer. In 2022, alongside ULA and Arianespace, a European firm, Blue Origin won a slice of the biggest launch contract in history, awarded by Amazon to fly the more than 3,000 satellites needed by its Kuiper project, which plans to provide fast internet access anywhere on Earth. (Complaints from Amazon shareholders eventually led to SpaceX being awarded a few flights as well.)

Catch-up on the high frontier

Blue Origin has other products in the pipeline, too. New Glenn’s test flight was supposed to carry a pair of probes to Mars, but delays to the rocket mean those will have to wait until spring 2025 to launch. The payload will instead be a “Blue Ring” spacecraft, a space-going tugboat designed to ferry satellites to their desired orbits, refuel them and even function as a sort of orbital computing platform, services for which Blue Origin hopes there will one day be a big market. The firm has plans for a private space station called the Orbital Reef, and has been asked by NASA to build a crewed landing craft for the agency’s Artemis Moon missions.

Blue Origin has not officially said when New Glenn will make its debut. Federal Aviation Administration notices suggest early on the morning of January 6th, British time, although bad weather or mechanical problems could see things slip.

Meanwhile, the competition is not standing still. Rocket Lab’s diminutive Electron rocket is due to be joined by the mid-size Neutron at some point in 2025. SpaceX’s enormous Starship, presently being tested, is designed to undercut everything else on the market. Still, if Mr Bezos’s firm can at last bring some ferocity, then the space industry may get a big new competitor.