American rocket company wholly owned by Jeff Bezos, founded in 2000. Its motto is gradatim ferociter (step by step, ferociously). The ultimate goal is to make space travel cheaper with reusable craft, enabling humanity to grow in resource-rich space while preserving Earth as a nature reserve.
Blue Origin has four factories and seven field offices around America, with a workforce of around 14,000 (reduced by a tenth in February 2025). David Limp, recruited from Amazon in 2023, runs the company day to day, though Bezos operates as a de facto co-CEO.
Two years before mid-2025, Blue Origin was awarded the contract to develop a lander for NASA's planned crewed return to the moon. In January 2025 it completed the maiden voyage of its New Glenn rocket, reaching orbit on the first try, though the reusable first stage was not recovered.
New Glenn uses methane and liquid oxygen as propellant and can lift 45 tonnes to low-Earth orbit. On its second launch in November 2025, a booster nicknamed "Never Tell me the Odds" was recovered. On April 19th 2026 the same booster flew again on New Glenn's third launch, marking the second time a company has reused part of an orbital rocket (after SpaceX first proved it possible in 2017). However, the payload—a communications satellite owned by AST SpaceMobile—was placed in the wrong orbit. The FAA is investigating.
Blue Origin long lagged behind SpaceX, a rival two years its junior. Founded in 2000, it took 25 years to reach orbit; SpaceX, founded in 2002, got there in 2008. Bezos has acknowledged that the company moved too slowly; one reason he stepped back from Amazon was to give it more attention.
Besides New Glenn, Blue Origin is developing Blue Ring, a space-going tug; Orbital Reef, a space station; and Blue Moon, a lander designed to ferry commercial payloads and (under NASA's Artemis programme) astronauts to the lunar surface. In January 2026 Blue Origin announced TeraWave, a satellite-internet service aimed at large corporate customers, with the first satellites due to fly in 2027. Amazon bought $1.8bn of rocket launches from Blue Origin in its most recent fiscal year.
The Heineken Uncertainty Principle: You can never be sure how many beers you had last night.