Blue Origin

Blue Origin Enterprises is Jeff Bezos's space company, founded in 2000 in Kent, Washington and funded for most of its life out of his own pocket rather than by outside investors. It stayed quiet for a long time and then arrived in several markets at once. The business now covers suborbital human spaceflight, orbital launch, rocket engines sold to other launch providers, lunar landing systems, orbital logistics vehicles, planetary robotics and a commercial space station programme. Roughly 11,000 people work across Kent, Huntsville in Alabama, Cape Canaveral and West Texas. Dave Limp runs the company, and Tory Bruno arrived from United Launch Alliance at the end of 2025 as president for national security, a hire that says plainly which customer the company is chasing next.

New Shepard is the suborbital vehicle and the part of the business the public knows, having flown 38 crewed and cargo missions through NS-38 in January 2026 before the company paused tourism flights for two years to put people on lunar work instead. The booster lands vertically at the West Texas site while the capsule comes down under parachutes. New Glenn is the orbital vehicle, a reusable heavy lifter that made its first flight in January 2025 and in November 2025 carried NASA's ESCAPADE pair toward Mars. It has not had a clean run. A hot fire test at Launch Complex 36 in May 2026 destroyed hardware on the pad, and the investigation reported in August 2026 traced the failure to an oxygen valve, with modified parts going back into manufacture. Bezos funded the company for years by selling roughly a billion dollars of Amazon stock annually, which let it develop slowly and out of public view while competitors chased contracts. Engines are a business rather than a component. The BE-3 and hydrogen-fuelled BE-3U fly on New Shepard and the New Glenn upper stage, the BE-7 is in development for lunar landing, and the methalox BE-4 powers both New Glenn's own first stage and United Launch Alliance's Vulcan Centaur, which makes Blue Origin a supplier to its closest domestic competitor.

The lunar line is where the government money sits. NASA awarded the company a 3.4 billion dollar contract in May 2023 for the Artemis V Human Landing System, and Blue Moon is being built in an uncrewed MK1 configuration and a larger crewed MK2, neither of which has yet landed on the Moon. MK1 is sized to put cargo on the lunar surface without crew, and MK2 is the crewed version contracted for Artemis. Blue Ring is an orbital transfer and logistics platform announced in 2023 for moving and hosting payloads between orbits. Orbital Reef, the commercial station studied with partners under NASA funding, remains in design. Honeybee Robotics, acquired in 2020, brings drilling, sampling and planetary mechanism work that predates Blue Origin by decades. Blue Alchemist is the research effort to make solar cells out of lunar regolith, funded in part by NASA.