Watching a rocket launch is tense business, especially in a launch control center. About two minutes before the Jan. 16 launch of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket, CEO Dave Limp turned to his boss Jeff Bezos and asked: “Launching Fire TV is much easier. Can I go back to my old job?”
Limp recounted that moment of levity in a talk at the Commercial Space Conference in Washington on Wednesday. Speaking with Washington Post space reporter Christian Davenport, the executive formerly in charge of such Amazon hardware ventures as Fire TV, Kindle ereaders, and Echo smart speakers and screens held forth for half an hour about the gig he started in December 2023.
New Glenn at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in December. (Credit: Blue Origin)
The top to-do item for Blue Origin is flying New Glenn again—and recovering the giant rocket’s first stage by landing it on an autonomous landing barge (named Jacklyn for Bezos’ mother).
“Next time we’re going to do our best to land the booster,” Limp said, mentioning later that he sees “late spring” as a doable launch timeframe.
On New Glenn’s debut, the booster did not make it all the way down, with telemetry from that stage freezing while it was 84,226 feet above the Atlantic. Limp said Blue Origin has figured out the malfunction but did not go into detail at the conference. “I think it was a combination of a couple of things,” he said. “The modifications are not complicated.”
After three test flights, Blue Origin plans to commence commercial missions for a variety of customers and accelerate its launch cadence. ‘
Amazon is among those customers, having booked 12 New Glenn launches (with options for 15 more) for the Project Kuiper satellite-broadband service. That competitor to SpaceX’s Starlink service faces a Federal Communications Commission deadline of July 30, 2026, to have half of a planned constellation of 3,236 satellites in orbit.
Fly Me to the Moon in 2025?
Limp then discussed New Glenn’s Blue Moon series of lunar landers. A Mark 1 model will deliver three tons of cargo to the Moon, and Blue is developing a Mark 2 crewed version for NASA’s Artemis project as an alternate to a version of SpaceX’s Starship. Both will fly on New Glenn.
Blue Moon’s Mark 1 cargo lander will be the largest vehicle on the Moon. (Credit: Blue Origin)
“I’m very confident that we can get that on the Moon this year,” Limp said of Blue Moon Mk1, which would become the largest vehicle ever landed on the lunar surface.
With much of Mk1’s subsystems common to Mk2, Limp professed confidence in Blue Origin’s ability to have that spacecraft ready for the fifth Artemis launch, currently set for 2030.
“I don’t think we’re going to be the long pole,” he said. As in, the Orion crew capsule, the Space Launch System rocket, or NASA’s planned Gateway lunar-orbit space station may hold up things instead.
“The last thing we want is another Sputnik moment, where another nation-state puts boots on the Moon before we do,” Limp added.
Davenport also asked Limp about President Trump’s recent emphasis on sending astronauts to Mars, a longtime goal of Elon Musk, who now enjoys a level of access to a president unparalleled among space executives and maybe any CEO.
“For Blue, it’s an ‘and,'” Limp said. He explained that solving the basic challenges in building Blue Moon—most important, keeping the liquid hydrogen fuel for its BE-7 engines barely above absolute zero over long periods of time—would pay off for missions to Mars.
“Once we solve that for the lunar architecture, I don’t think that’s our overall challenge,” he said.
Blue Origin’s smallest rocket, the suborbital and reusable New Shepard, continues to fly and has a role to play in these larger efforts. Limp endorsed its utility as a development vehicle for Blue Origin—“it is a testbed for almost everything we do”—while noting its role in space tourism.
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A surprisingly large number of people have taken suborbital flights to space on New Shepard. (Credit: Blue Origin)
“We’ve flown more than 7% of the people that have ever been above the Kármán Line,” he said of the 100-kilometer/62-mile altitude internationally recognized as space. (NASA sets that line at 80 kilometers, or 50 miles.)
“It has a profound effect on the people who go up,” he said, before acknowledging but not specifying the cost of a ticket. “There’s no buyer’s remorse.”
‘I Would Pay Him for This Job’
One of the most famous New Shepard passengers—after Star Trek actor William Shatner—was Bezos, who flew on the first crewed launch of that vehicle in 2021. Davenport (who notes Bezos’ ownership of the Post in his stories) had a few questions for Limp about working for Bezos in the company that has now become the Amazon founder’s primary work.
“I would pay him for this job,” Limp said. “Luckily, he has chosen not to take that card from me.”
Bezos walks near New Shepard after flying into space in 2021. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
“It is like a master class every single day,” Limp said of Bezos’s immersion in spaceflight. “He knows more about rockets and rocket engines than he does about e-commerce.”
Limp described himself as initially reluctant to take the job at Blue Origin, saying “I didn’t think my skill set was the right skill set for the job.”
But Bezos talked him out of that and into the new job, which he joked has come with the upside of not having to worry about one common concern about Amazon’s hardware: “Nobody asks me about the privacy of my rockets either, so that’s good.”
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About Rob Pegoraro
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