Blue Origin to seek private funding beyond Jeff Bezos
For the first time Blue Origin now intends to raise additional outside private funding, $10 billion total, beyond the billions Jeff Bezos has been investing in company for the past decade.
In a memo sent to employees on Wednesday and seen by Business Insider, Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp said the company would raise [$10 billion in] funds at a $130 billion valuation.
…The New York Times’ DealBook earlier reported on the raise and said it is being led by asset management firm Coatue Management with a $2 billion contribution from Bezos.
By my count in 2020, Bezos had pumped somewhere between $2 to $6 billion into Blue Origin, the funds coming from sales of his Amazon stock beginning in 2017. With this new investment round, he will have committed another $2 billion.
Unlike the earlier funding from Bezos, however, this new investment is occurring with Limp as the company’s CEO. When the previous funding occurred the company’s CEO was Bob Smith, who essentially wasted more than five years from 2017 to 2023 accomplishing nothing. No rockets got built, engine development was delayed endlessly, and good engineers were seen fleeing the company. Since Limp took over in 2024 he has aggressively worked to change the moribund culture he inherited from Smith. Under his leadership this funding could really make a difference.
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“from 2017 to 2023 accomplishing nothing. No rockets got built, engine development was delayed endlessly, and good engineers were seen fleeing the company. ”
$50 bucks says this is the management style still taught in most MBA programs. Think Boeing.
SpaceX could start an MBA program teaching their processes and it would revolutionize American industry.
It does appear to me that Limp is trying very hard, with some success, to bring the right kind of thinking to Blue Origin that we see at SpaceX.
Note too that what SpaceX does is actually the traditional way American companies functioned until the 1970s. About then they were captured by the government and the “military-industrial complex”, which dictated from Washington how things would be done. The result was Boeing and all the big space companies and their inability to compete and innovate.
Competition and freedom is bringing old Yankee ingeniuty back. I think by the end of 2027 we shall be see it flying in space in very bright colors.
One aspect of freedom would be the ability to hard test applicants without getting sued for racism, sexism, ageism, and any other ism. College degree requirements are partially an attempt to sort wheat from chaff without the legal problems. One use I see for AI is company specific sorting of job applicants. Rampant cheating, often with AI, could be exposed as detrimental to your future when you clearly aren’t qualified. I see the credentialism as one of the anti-freedom and anti-progress issues with society today. I believe Boeing and Blue Origin are both victims of this to some extent. My understanding is that SpaceX has somehow avoided much of that trap, highlighted by various lawsuits.
On the other hand, I see ways forward that can vastly improve the competitiveness of people worldwide. AI as company specific mentors to individual people. Many of the college grads I talk to specifically mention that their job training could have been done in a semester or two, with the rest of the 4-6 years being credentialism that is mostly forgotten and useless.
SpaceX has long since cut out the MBA middleman, as it were. It has been true for some time that even a year or two worth of SpaceX employment on one’s resume is worth more than an MBA.
Limp is rather like Bruno….doing the best he can under a stingy leadership.
Bezos hasn’t been stingy, it’s just that the ante needed to stay in the game is rapidly increasing. When the richest man on Earth has to hit the capital markets for $100 billion to finance his plans, then the merely 4th-richest man, with 1/4 the net worth, won’t have much choice but to do likewise, even if at an order of magnitude smaller scale.
Looks like since BO isn’t going to rebuild a launch tower, they’re going to stay with booster landing legs, rather than play catch. And no upper stage reuse. Will that compete with Starship?!
Blue intends to both repair and substantially modify its LC-36A launch tower to support its revised concept of New Glenn operations. Lots of new steel will be added.
You are correct, though, that a lack of 2nd-stage reusability will put New Glenn at a significant disadvantage, in terms of both cost and cadence, with Starship. That will be especially true for lunar missions of any sort where multiple launches are required.
Even if BO rebuilds a tower, that does not mean a catch versus landing legs.. I am assuming legs add more mass than catch points, so combined with no 2nd stage reuse, it’s an affordability challenge.
I think that there is going to be for a long time a shortage of launch providers. That shortage is going to allow rockets not as reusable as Starship to compete, simply because customers will have no other options.
The advantage in that competition is going to go to the rockets that are at least partly reusable, such as New Glenn, Neutron, and Relativity. And while Stoke Space will be completely reusable and in this group, its launch capacity is much smaller, limiting its customer base.
At the bottom of the pile will be the expendables (Ariane-6, Vulcan, LVM, PSLV, SSLV, Spectrum, RFA-1 etc), but even those will have some customers, simply because the others won’t be able to meet the demand.
” . . . the expendables . . . ”
That sounds like a movie; oh, wait. Perhaps could be updated. Maybe as donghua: “A gritty group of expendable launchers band together to launch a crucial satellite for the Heroes of the People’s Liberation Army!”
Correct. No booster catching in Blue’s future – at least its immediate future. The extra steel on the rebuilt tower will support a rectangular split platform that allows a big crane to stand the booster and 2nd stage up as a unit, then provides a place for people to stand to assist lowering the encapsulated payload into place. If Blue ever builds a crewed vehicle, this platform will probably be elaborated later into a “white room.”