The company, which has been largely personally funded by Bezos since he founded it in a Seattle warehouse in 2000, recently won a major NASA contract to develop a spacecraft to land astronauts on the moon.
But the company also has lagged behind Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Its much-delayed New Glenn rocket has not yet flown to orbit. And while the company has flown a number of private citizens, including Bezos and his brother Mark, on short suborbital trips to the edge of space, the company’s space tourism program has been grounded for more than a year after a mishap during a mission without people on board.
Smith came to Blue Origin from Honeywell Aerospace with the mandate to transform the company from what had largely been a research and development venture into a revenue generating, operational firm that would compete for and win government contracts.
Under his leadership, the company grew enormously, and quickly — expanding its headquarters in Kent, just south of Seattle, and opening an engine manufacturing plant in Huntsville, Ala., as well as an enormous manufacturing facility in Cape Canaveral, Fla.
In an email to staff that was obtained by The Post, Bezos noted “the significant growth and transformation we’ve experienced during his tenure.” Bezos wrote that Blue “has grown to several billion dollars in sales orders,” as well as from 850 people when Smith joined to more than 10,000 today. (Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post. Interim CEO Patty Stonesifer sits on Amazon’s board.)
But Smith’s tenure was also marked by tension and tumult. In 2021, The Post chronicled the problems at Blue Origin in an investigation that found that in 2019 it fired its head of recruiting after employees complained of sexism.
A consultant retained by the company also found that Smith had an ineffective and micromanaging leadership style. Employees complained of a toxic work environment. And one said in a letter to Bezos, Smith and other top leaders that, “Our current culture is toxic to our success and many can see it spreading throughout the company.”
The problems at the spaceflight company were “systemic,” according to the letter, which was obtained by The Post and verified by two former employees familiar with the matter. “The loss of trust in Blue’s leadership is common,” the letter said.
“It’s bad,” one former top executive told The Post at the time. “I think it’s a complete lack of trust. Leadership has not engendered any trust in the employee base.”
Another said: “The C-suite is out of touch with the rank-and-file pretty severely. It’s very dysfunctional. It’s condescending. It’s demoralizing, and what happens is we can’t make progress and end up with huge delays.”
The report followed an essay posted publicly by Alexandra Abrams, the former head of Blue Origin employee communications, who wrote that the company’s “culture sits on a foundation that ignores the plight of our planet, turns a blind eye to sexism, is not sufficiently attuned to safety concerns, and silences those who seek to correct wrongs.” The essay was posted to the whistleblowing site Lioness, which publishes stories of workplace misconduct and places them with media outlets.
Bezos has said that Blue Origin “is the most important work I’m doing,” and that he was investing $1 billion a year into the venture. Amazon, he has said, was the “winning lottery ticket” that gave him the resources to start a space company and keep funding it. Space is his lifelong passion. But despite the enormous capital Bezos has invested in Blue Origin, the company has continually lagged behind SpaceX, which holds contracts to fly cargo and crew to the International Space Station and hoist satellites for the Pentagon.
SpaceX also beat out Blue Origin to win the first contract to develop the spacecraft that would return NASA astronauts to the surface of the moon. At the time, Musk told The Post that Bezos “needs to run BO full-time for it to be successful. Frankly, I hope he does.”
In his email, Smith said that he would “step aside” on Dec. 4, but remain with the company until Jan. 2.
Limp is taking over at a critical time for Blue Origin. The company’s large New Glenn rocket, which is to be used to launch satellites and eventually people to orbit, has long been delayed. But in his email, Bezos said it “is nearing launch next year.” The company also holds a NASA contract, with partner Sierra Space, to build a commercial space station in low Earth orbit.
Much of the company’s efforts are focused on Bezos’ passion: the moon. After losing to SpaceX in 2021, Blue Origin won a $3.4 billion contract from NASA earlier this year to build a lander that could put humans on the moon later in the decade. It also won a $34.7 million NASA contract to build solar cells and transmission wire out of the moon’s regolith — rocks and dirt.
At Amazon, Limp serves as senior vice president for devices and services, where he has led programs such as Kindle, Alexa Fire TV. He also has run its Kuiper internet satellite business, which intends to compete with SpaceX’s Starlink service. The company is hoping to launch its first satellites later this year.
That is another area where SpaceX has dominated. While Kuiper is waiting for its first batch of satellite to go up, and for the New Glenn rocket to begin flying, SpaceX has launched nearly 5,000 Starlink satellites. The company recently said the service is available on “all 7 continents, in over 60 countries” and has more than 2 million customers.
