The Amazon founder started his private rocket company in 2000, but its busiest phase could just now be starting.
For most of its two decades of existence, Blue Origin was like Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory in the children’s book by Roald Dahl. It was a rocket company founded by Jeffrey P. Bezos, the billionaire who had created Amazon. That much was known. What the company was actually doing was shrouded in mystery. “But everyone wanted to get in,” laughed Carissa Christensen, founder and chief executive of Bryce Space and Technology, an aerospace consulting firm. Mr. Bezos announced on Tuesday that he would be stepping down as chief executive of Amazon this summer and becoming executive chairman. In his letter to Amazon employees, he said he wanted to put time and energy into other passions and listed Blue Origin among them. The coming years for Blue Origin promise to be busy — flying tourists on short suborbital jaunts, launching satellites on a new rocket, developing a lunar lander for NASA. Does that mean Mr. Bezos will take a bigger day-to-day role at his rocket company? “If Jeff chose to spend more time at Blue Origin during the next phase of his career, that would be a very good thing for Blue,” said Rob Meyerson, who was president of Blue Origin from 2003 to 2017. “He brings great intelligence, great operational expertise and great mission passion to the business.” Mr. Meyerson noted that Mr. Bezos’ other ventures include the Bezos Earth Fund, which last year gave a $100 million grant to the Environmental Defense Fund to build and operate a methane-detecting satellite. Amazon, where Mr. Bezos will continue to be involved, is developing Project Kuiper, a constellation of satellites to beam internet service to Earth. “It’s clear that space will be a prominent theme,” Mr. Meyerson said. Mr. Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000 — two years before Elon Musk started the Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, better known as SpaceX. But while Mr. Musk and SpaceX have already built a thriving business — launching satellites and NASA astronauts to orbit and developing a huge rocket named Starship that is intended to take people to Mars someday — Blue Origin seems to lag. In its early days, the company only occasionally offered drips of news.
