Blue Origin's rockets are making a name for themselves in the private space race.
Jeff Bezos founded the aerospace company in 2000 with the idea of moving heavy, polluting industries off our planet and into space, where millions of people would live and work. The company's name, Blue Origin, refers to Earth.
Bezos called Blue Origin his "most important work," in a 2018 interview with Axel Springer.
Blue Origin's mission is to "build a road to space" by developing reliable, cost-effective rockets.
Blue Origin is vying for space industry dominance as spaceflight companies aim for the moon and Mars. The company's New Shepard rockets regularly fly tourists on short flights to the edge of space. Its New Glenn rocket is designed to carry heavy missions into orbit or to the moon. Blue Origin engineers are also developing a moon lander, called Blue Moon, for future NASA use.
Blue Origin's ambitions have been a source of rivalry between Bezos and Elon Musk, whose company SpaceX remains the world's leading rocket-launch provider.
History and founding
Bezos has said he founded Blue Origin with the vision of giant space stations hosting entire mega-cities of people, based on concepts proposed by the physicist Gerard K. O'Neill in 1976.
Bezos told Lex Fridman in 2023 that he wants to support one trillion humans living throughout the solar system. He added that would result in 1,000 Mozarts and 1,000 Einsteins at any given time.
"We could easily support a civilization that large with all the resources in the solar system," he added.
Still, Bezos says in a video on Blue Origin's website that "Earth is the best planet."
Blue Origin did not initially seem to improve Jeff Bezos' net worth, though. Bezos later revealed, in 2017, that he was selling Amazon stock to finance the rocket company.
The company kept a very low profile for its first two decades. Blue Origin's first rocket launch was in 2015. That was an uncrewed test flight of the suborbital New Shepard rocket.
Bezos himself flew on New Shepard's first passenger flight in July 2021, making history as the first billionaire to reach the Kármán line, which is a somewhat arbitrary but internationally recognized boundary at 100 kilometers (62 miles) altitude. It's sometimes referred to as the beginning of outer space.
Bezos stepped down as Amazon CEO that same year, saying he wanted to focus on Blue Origin.
In May 2023, Blue Origin won a NASA contract to land astronauts on the moon, after suing the agency for awarding its first moon-landing contract to only SpaceX. The company lost the lawsuit.
Blue Origin's super-sized orbital rocket, New Glenn, launched for the first time in January 2025.
In April 2025, the company clinched its first Pentagon launch contracts.
Blue Origin's CEO is Dave Limp. The company is headquartered in Kent, Washington, and has rocket launch facilities in West Texas. It has also used a launchpad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.
Blue Origin rockets
Blue Origin has one suborbital rocket and one orbital rocket. It's also developing a moon lander and a moon-orbiting spacecraft.
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New Glenn
Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket is designed to launch missions into Earth's orbit and to the moon, with a reusable booster to reduce launch costs.
New Glenn is named after the first American to reach orbit, John Glenn. Seven BE-4 engines on the booster give it enough power to carry up to 45 metric tons into space.
New Glenn belongs to a new generation of the largest, most powerful rockets ever built, next to SpaceX's Starship and NASA's new moon rocket, the Space Launch System.
Blue Origin had begun developing an orbital launch system by 2013, and New Glenn finally made its inaugural flight in January 2025.
New Glenn's first launch was a major leap forward for Blue Origin. It was the first time a rocket company successfully reached orbit on its first-ever attempt.
Here's how the rocket's launch works: As New Glenn screams through the skies, the booster does most of the heavy lifting. Once its fuel is spent and the rocket is on a strong trajectory toward space, the booster separates from the rocket's second stage, which continues onward using BE-3U engines.
Blue Origin aims to land the booster on a platform in the ocean, but on New Glenn's first flight, the booster was lost as it fell back to Earth. Eventually, the company wants to reuse boosters up to 25 times.
According to Blue Origin, the company is already working with customers for New Glenn missions, including AST SpaceMobile, telecommunications companies, and the US Space Force.
New Shepard
Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket is designed for suborbital flights which skim the edge of space. It has been flying tourist crews of up to six passengers since 2021.
Bezos himself flew on New Shepard's first flight, then took the Star Trek actor William Shatner on the rocket's second flight later that year.
Upon landing, Shatner said seeing the blackness of space was like looking at death, and added, "I hope I never recover from this."
Blue Origin plans to fly its first all-female passenger crew aboard New Shepard on April 14, including Gayle King, Katy Perry, and Bezos's fiancée, Lauren Sánchez.
Flights on New Shepard last about 11 minutes. Passengers get about three minutes of microgravity, where they can unbuckle from their seats, drift around the spaceship's cabin, and peer out the windows at Earth, before strapping back in for the plummet home.
Because it doesn't need to push itself all the way into orbit, New Shepard is a tiny rocket at just 61 feet tall. BE-3PM engines launch the rocket, then re-fire to softly land it back on the ground. New Shepard is completely reusable.
New Shepard's development involved nine years of testing, which included 16 test flights and three tests of the capsule's emergency escape system.
The vehicle is named after astronaut Alan Shepard, who was the first American to travel to space. Unlike Glenn's orbital flight, Shepard's flight was suborbital.
Blue Moon
Blue Origin is developing the Blue Moon vehicle to land missions on the surface of the moon, launched by the New Glenn rocket.
The company is developing variations of the spacecraft for cargo — up to three metric tons of it — and human crews.
Blue Origin is building BE-7 engines for the lander. The engines are designed to operate in the vacuum of space with enough power to land heavy missions on the moon.
Blue Origin is developing the lander under a $3.4 billion NASA contract.
The contract calls for Blue Origin to conduct an uncrewed test mission to the lunar surface before carrying two astronauts there in 2029.
For NASA astronaut missions, Blue Moon must be able to dock to the Lunar Gateway space station the agency is planning to build in lunar orbit.
Blue Ring
In 2023 Blue Origin announced it was working on a highly maneuverable spacecraft called Blue Ring.
The company plans to sell Blue Ring missions to other companies, which can put more than 3,000 kilograms (about 6,600 pounds) of hardware on board.
Blue Origin says the vehicle can enter a variety of orbits between Earth and the moon.
"Blue Ring addresses two of the most difficult challenges in spaceflight today: growing space infrastructure and increasing mobility on-orbit," Paul Ebertz, the senior vice president of Blue Origin's in-space systems, said in a statement.
The first New Glenn launch carried a prototype of Blue Ring.
Blue Origin vs. SpaceX
Blue Origin and SpaceX have competed for NASA contracts and clout. SpaceX frequently wins the competition.
SpaceX was founded two years later than Blue Origin, but it was launching rockets to orbit by 2008. Its highly influential orbital Falcon 9 rocket first began flying in 2010. Blue Origin didn't launch its first orbital rocket until 2025.
Some of Bezos' space projects mirror Musk's.
For example, like SpaceX's Starship, Blue Origin's New Glenn is designed to be a reusable super-heavy-lift mega-rocket.
While SpaceX launches thousands of Starlink internet satellites into orbit, Bezos's counterpart — Amazon's Kuiper satellites — have been building to their first launch.
At the New York Times DealBook Summit in December 2024, Bezos said that Blue Origin "is not a very good business, yet."
Still, he added, "It's going to be the best business that I've ever been involved in."
