In 2021, Elon Musk trolled Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, mocking his rival’s slow progress toward launching a rocket into space. “Can’t get it up (to orbit) lol,” he wrote on Twitter.
Now, almost 25 years after Bezos started the company, Blue Origin is on the brink of clapping back. Its powerful New Glenn rocket is at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center for its inaugural launch, which could come as soon as early morning Sunday.
Plenty of people in the space industry and government are cheering for it to succeed – and to end SpaceX’s near monopoly on lofting American satellites into orbit.
“The space industry likes having choices,” said Caleb Henry, an analyst at Quilty Space. “And it doesn’t have that today. It just has SpaceX.”
And Blue Origin is selling launches at a price per satellite that’s significantly better than SpaceX, a former employee told Forbes.
The launch attempt comes less than two weeks before Donald Trump returns to the White House. During his first term, the former president attacked Bezos over negative coverage in the Washington Post, which Bezos owns. Now Trump, with Musk at his right hand, is promising a shakeup in government spending and regulation that could tilt the playing field for the commercial space industry — and threaten some of Blue Origin’s government contracts.
ANIMAL SPIRITS
Bezos has positioned Blue Origin as the slow and steady alternative to SpaceX’s “move fast and fail quickly” ethos. Its motto is “gradatim ferociter,” Latin for “step by step, ferociously,” and its logo features two tortoises. So far the tortoise has been soundly beaten by SpaceX’s hare.
Over the past decade, SpaceX ramped up its launch cadence to unprecedented levels while its competition was largely sidelined. The old heavyweights of space launch — the United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin, and Europe’s Arianespace — struggled with delays in developing new rockets, and Western sanctions removed Russian rockets as an option. SpaceX’s Falcon rockets propelled cargo to orbit 133 times in 2024, with one failure, the vast majority of the 145 launches attempted in the U.S. last year and more than half of the 263 worldwide, according to space activity tracker Jonathan McDowell.
But New Glenn, first announced in 2016, promises to be a fierce competitor. Like SpaceX’s Falcon 9, it’s a two-stage heavy lift workhorse, with the first stage designed to return to earth for reuse. But according to Blue Origin, a larger nose cone gives New Glenn twice the cargo volume of Falcon 9, and its powerful engines are designed to propel double the payload mass.
And Blue Origin is pricing to give customers more bang for the buck than SpaceX, according to a former employee who now works for a competitor who spoke to Forbes on the condition of anonymity.
Blue Origin is charging roughly $110 million per launch, he said, compared to about $70 million for a Falcon 9 – effectively offering to carry twice as many satellites for roughly 50% more money.
Blue Origin didn’t respond to a request for comment from Forbes.
New Glenn is already proving attractive to companies building large constellations of small satellites for low-Earth orbit, particularly as those satellites have gotten larger, said Henry.
Blue Origin has won contracts to use it to launch satellites for all of the major constellations, except, of course, for SpaceX’s Starlink. That includes AST Mobile, which is developing a network to provide cellular service from space. The company has said New Glenn can carry eight of its Block 2 satellites, which will be the largest yet put in low-Earth orbit. Falcon 9 can carry just four.
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And Bezos’ Amazon.com is leaning heavily on Blue Origin to realize its plans for its Kuiper satellite network. Blue Origin is slated to launch at least 23% of the constellation and potentially as much as half. Amazon expects to pay Blue Origin $2.7 billion through 2028, it said in a financial filing last year.
The U.S. government is also eager for another option to launch its intelligence and communications satellites. In June the Defense Department picked Blue Origin, along with SpaceX and United Launch Alliance, to compete for up to $5.6 billion worth of launches through 2029.
MONEY OUT
It’s welcome revenue after years of heavy spending to build the company. On the New Glenn program alone, Blue Origin has spent on the order of $10 billion, the former employee estimated. Apart from a few NASA contracts, that money has come from the deep pockets of Bezos, who has committed to use the vast fortune he’s made from Amazon to realize his boyhood space dreams. Forbes estimates his net worth at $233 billion, a distant second in the world to Musk’s $416 billion.
While it’s taken a quarter century for Blue Origin to take its first shot at space, it has notched impressive achievements on the way, while building infrastructure for mass rocket launches that SpaceX only put together gradually after reaching orbit. The company developed a powerful rocket engine, the Be-4, that’s powered two successful launches of United Launch Alliance’s new Vulcan rocket. With its reusable New Shepard rocket, which is designed to bring tourists to the edge of space, Blue Origin has become the only rocket company besides SpaceX to pull off the trick of landing its first stage. And it has built up manufacturing facilities expected to produce over 100 Be-4 engines in 2025, and multiple boosters to support a pace of 12 launches a year.
“It’s easy to be a little flip about, ‘SpaceX has done so much and Blue Origin has done little,’ but it’s nuanced,” said Carissa Christensen, CEO of the space consulting firm BryceTech.
A successful launch would be powerful validation for Blue Origin, but the attempt comes against a cloudy political backdrop. Trump has tasked Musk with leading an effort to chop government spending and regulation. A relaxation of rules in the heavily regulated space industry would help all participants, but competitors fear preferential treatment for SpaceX.
Exhibit A: Trump’s nominee to run NASA, billionaire Jared Isaacman. His company Shift4 Payments has invested in SpaceX, and Isaacman has bankrolled two private spaceflights on Falcon rockets.
Last March, Isaacman questioned the wisdom of NASA’s decision to fund the development of redundant lunar landers from SpaceX and Blue Origin, in case one faltered.
But Bezos has professed confidence that Musk won’t use his influence in the Trump administration to benefit SpaceX at Blue Origin’s expense.
“I take at face value what has been said, which is that [Musk] is not going to use his political power to advantage his own companies or to disadvantage his competitors,” Bezos said in December at a New York Times conference.
Bezos, in any event, is looking far beyond the next four years. He wants Blue Origin to drive the creation of an off-world economy where manufacturing and mining is done in in space, and the “Earth will be zoned residential and light industry.” Someday he thinks that will make Blue Origin a bigger business than Amazon, he said at the Times event. But it’s all predicated on bringing down the cost of reaching space, starting with New Glenn.
“We know how to travel to space. We know how to land on the Moon. We need to be able to do it a hundred times cheaper,” Bezos told space YouTuber Tim Dodd in September. “That’s what will really open the heavens to humanity.”
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