Blue Origin CEO vows all-in effort to beat rival SpaceX in moon race

By Sana Pashankar, Lorelei Smillie and Loren Grush

 

Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin “will move heaven and Earth” to get to the moon before rival SpaceX, said Chief Executive Officer Dave Limp. 

 

The US needs “two launch companies that are competing vigorously against each other to try to give us the most capabilities,” he said in an interview with Bloomberg Television’s Annmarie Hordern at the Defense Tech Summit in West Palm Beach, Florida.

 

As part of the lunar push, Blue Origin is shifting employees from its New Shepard space tourism programmes to focus on efforts to head back to the moon.

 

“It just made prudent sense from our standpoint to take the brilliant people that were working on New Shepard, pause that for a while, for at least two years, and then repurpose them to even further accelerate our efforts in lunar and launch,” said Limp.

 

Blue Origin announced in January that it was suspending flights of its New Shepard rocket, which carries paying customers on short trips to the edge of space and back. 

 

The flights had been a mainstay of Blue Origin’s business, with founder Bezos flying on the first crewed flight of the vehicle in 2021. New Shepard also garnered attention for flying celebrities including Katy Perry, William Shatner and Michael Strahan.

 

Blue Origin plans to launch and land a spacecraft to carry cargo to the moon as early as this year and also holds a $3.4 billion contract to develop a lander to send astronauts there for Nasa’s Artemis programmes. 

 

Nasa had long planned on using SpaceX’s Starship rocket to be the first vehicle to land astronauts on the moon for Artemis. However, due to SpaceX’s development delays, the agency last year called on both SpaceX and Blue Origin to come up with plans to accelerate their lander production.

 

Nasa Administrator Jared Isaacman told Bloomberg in December that the agency would use “whichever lander was available first.”

 

Last year, Blue Origin debuted its New Glenn orbital rocket and demonstrated the ability to land the vehicle upright back on Earth. 

 

Blue Origin is preparing now for the next New Glenn launch, which could take place in late February or early March, Limp said.

 

During a Feb. 2 visit to Blue Origin’s launch complex in Cape Canaveral, Florida, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth praised the company, saying “Blue Origin is going to do plenty of winning.”