Blue Origin CEO Dave Limb is calling attention to Jeff Bezos' space company

Dave Limp had just one question for Jeff Bezos when he interviewed last year to become CEO of Blue Origin, the billionaire's space venture.

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

After 14 years of growing up Amazon Limb told CNBC that he made it clear to Bezos that he was not interested in leading Blue Origin if the nearly 25-year-old venture was not intended to be a serious company.

“I don't know how to have a hobby,” Lemp said, adding, “If it's a hobby, it's not for me.”

But he said Bezos was adamant that Blue Origin needed to be a company.

Limb admitted that it took some convincing from Bezos to be able to move into the space sector. “My initial reaction was: ‘This is not the right role for me because I am not an aerospace engineer,’” he said. But he decided to take a leap of faith.

“Jeff felt that (Blue Origin) needed manufacturing expertise; it needed decisiveness; it needed a little energy,” Lemp said.

Lemp has now been CEO of Blue Origin for nine months and counting. He took over from previous leadership that had massively expanded the company's workforce and infrastructure, but fell behind for years on several key programs and lost bids for key government contracts.

Blue Origin has for many years been taking tourists and researchers to the edge of space on short trips, including Bezos himself. Over the past two decades, Bezos has been spending billions of dollars annually to transform Blue Origin into a space powerhouse. The company's projects range from rockets and spacecraft to space stations and lunar landers.

However, at the orbiting industry table, Blue Origin has not entered the serious rocket game, as SpaceX still dominates the US launch market, followed by United Launch Alliance, Rocket laboratory And Space Firefly.

But the company said it is closer than ever to the long-awaited debut of its New Glenn rocket. The launch vehicle is about 320 feet tall, and is advertised as lifting up to 45,000 kilograms (or more than 99,000 pounds) into low Earth orbit, twice what a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket can lift.

Like the Falcon 9, the New Glenn is designed to be partially reusable. Blue Origin aims to return and land the rocket's booster, the largest and most valuable section, to unlock the kind of cost and time efficiencies that SpaceX claims with its rockets.

New Glenn's first launch attempt is scheduled for November. Blue Origin is in the final stages of putting everything together, including a recent crucial test fire of the rocket's upper stage last month.

Originally the company was aiming to achieve the audacious feat of sending NASA's ESCAPADE mission to Mars in New Glenn's debut. But as the launch window dwindled, the agency delayed the release of ESCAPADE to a later launch date. In lieu of a mission, Blue Origin will provide a demonstration of its Blue Ring spacecraft at New Glenn's first launch.

Blue Origin is headquartered in the Seattle suburb of Kent, Washington, and has more than 10,000 employees there and in six other major locations across the country, including industry heartlands in Texas, Florida and Alabama. Speaking plainly, Lemp said Blue Origin has been “in the R&D phase for a long time,” an aspect of the company culture he's trying to change.

“We were very good at building shiny factories and very good at building high-fidelity prototypes. Some of those prototypes even flew…but that's not what we want to do to scale up to become a world-class manufacturer,” Limp said.

“We need to be able to build things more often,” he added.

But he said he sees a real enthusiasm for the space throughout Blue's workforce, describing that passion as the foundation of a “missionary culture.” In Limb's view, Amazon's customer-focused principles drive the tech giant's culture — but Amazon doesn't have the “strong mission that Blue has.”

“People's eyes light up, almost to a T,” Limp said. “They grew up thinking about space, they always wanted to work in the space industry, and here they are at Blue working in space.”

Now he's trying to install Amazon's customer focus as a core part of Blue Origin. While Blue's customers — the likes of NASA, ULA and suborbital astronauts — are very different from the consumers Limp used to focus on, his message to Blue's employees is to make delivering for its customers a top priority.

“Even if the technology is really nice and fun, the customer has to be at the forefront,” Limp said.

To further transform Blue's culture, Lemp highlighted a number of key leadership additions: Allen Parker as CFO after previous executive finance roles at Zillow and Amazon; Jennifer Peña Linos as chief people officer, after managing human resources at Limp's former Amazon hardware team; Ian Richardson as Senior Vice President of Manufacturing Operations after a long stint as Production Manager at SpaceX; and Tim Collins as Vice President of Global Supply Chain after previously leading the global operations of Flexport and Amazon.

Limp also made a change by moving more of the company's employees to the factory floor.

“You can walk into a factory and know when it's running well and know when it's not,” he said. “It doesn't matter how much capital expenditure you make, what kind of machinery you have, if you're not using it the right way. It's like having a shiny new car parked in the driveway – what's the fun in that?”

Limp has two main goals in his first year as CEO: launch New Glenn and get Blue's engine production buzzing.

“We weren't going anywhere without engines, and we had to figure out how to build engines at the rate,” Limp said.

Blue Origin's BE-4 engine powers the New Glenn rocket as well as ULA's Vulcan rocket. The latter requires two engines per launch.

With ULA looking to launch four Vulcan flights this year — with two remaining and two remaining — Blue has delivered eight flight-ready BE-4 engines to ULA, as well as seven BE-4 engines for the first New Glenn launch. In the first two Vulcan launches, the BE-4 engines performed as expected.

“We want to (deliver) an engine almost weekly by the end of the year. I'm not sure we'll get to exactly a week, but it will be less than 10 days… (and) by the end of 2025, we have to be even faster than that,” Limb said. .

Limp has a “very high level of confidence” that New Glenn will launch before the end of the year. Blue plans to rapidly expand New Glenn's missions, and wants to carry out up to 10 New Glenn launches in the next year. However, it still has a long way to go ahead of rival SpaceX, which is targeting to launch approximately 150 Falcon rockets this year.

Perhaps most optimistically, Blue is aiming to land New Glenn on its first launch, calling the rocket “So You Telling Me There a Chance.” No company has been able to land on the first attempt with an orbital rocket booster, and New Glenn will aim to reach a 200-foot-wide platform on a ship called the Jacqueline in the Atlantic Ocean.

“It's going to be adventurous. It's going to be fun. I'm excited about it… but if we don't stick with the landing the first time, that's OK. We have another booster right behind it. We're going to build more,” Limp said.

It seems almost inevitable that New Glenn's future will include manned spacecraft — especially given Blue's long-term mission: “We envision millions of people living and working in space for the benefit of Earth.” Currently, only SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft is certified by NASA to transport astronauts to and from orbit afterward Boeing Starliner suffered another setback this summer.

But Limp deferred when asked about the development of the New Glenn crew capsule: “There's nothing to say about that.”

Blue Origin has gained experience in the low-risk suborbital domain of human spaceflight with its New Shepard rocket and capsule. Limb pointed out that Blue Origin is working to return “New Shepard” to the rhythm of regular flights, by transporting crews and research cargo.

She has flown two missions for New Shepard this year, and aims to do a third next week. This mission will also feature a new rocket booster and capsule to add a second vehicle to “better meet growing customer demand,” the company said, after it lost a booster during a cargo flight failure in September 2022.

Beyond producing New Glenn and engines, Blue is making more progress: last year it won a $3.4 billion contract with NASA to build a lunar lander for the agency's astronauts. In the spring, Blue got the opportunity to join the Pentagon's lucrative National Security Space Launch Program, a switch after missing out on the previous phase of the NSSL program in 2020.

As for Lemp, he spends his time making a “short trip back and forth between” Blue Origin facilities every two and a half weeks. It moves from its headquarters in Seattle, to meeting with customers in Washington, D.C., to seeing engine production and testing in Huntsville, Alabama, and finally checking out New Glenn's work at Cape Canaveral, Texas. It's all part of his interest in leading a proper space company, not a billionaire hobby.

“Let's have the financial discipline to build a business we love, and let's make decisions quickly, knowing we're going to make some mistakes,” Lemp said. “But let's not make the same mistakes, and let's address them quickly.”