KAHULUI, Hawaii — Bob Smith, chief executive of Blue Origin, will resign from the corporate in December and get replaced by Dave Limp, the Amazon executive who had been overseeing development of its Project Kuiper constellation.
In an email to employees Sept. 25, Smith announced that he would step down as CEO effective Dec. 4 after six years on the job. He said he would remain with the corporate until early January to support the transition to his successor.
Smith said in the e-mail he was leaving Blue Origin with “pride and satisfaction” in the corporate’s accomplishments since joining the corporate. “We’ve rapidly scaled this company from its prototyping and research roots to a big, outstanding space business,” he wrote. “We’ve got the best strategy, a supremely talented team, a sturdy customer base, and among the most technically ambitious and exciting projects in your entire industry.”
Blue Origin has grown from fewer than 1,000 employees when Smith took over as CEO to greater than 10,000 today. During his tenure the corporate accomplished development and began industrial flights of its Recent Shepard suborbital vehicle, while continuing development of the Recent Glenn orbital launch vehicle and the BE-4 engine that powers each Recent Glenn and United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rocket. The corporate also won a NASA award in May to develop a crewed lunar lander, Blue Moon, for the Artemis lunar exploration campaign.
Nonetheless, the corporate has also faced the perception that it’s falling behind SpaceX, which has performed 68 orbital launches thus far this 12 months using its Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets, in addition to an unsuccessful test flight of its next-generation Starship vehicle. Recent Glenn is years behind schedule, although an organization executive said at World Satellite Business Week earlier this month that Blue Origin was planning “multiple” launches of the vehicle in 2024.
Recent Shepard, meanwhile, has been grounded since an engine failure during a September 2022 flight that carried payloads but no people. Smith said at a conference in June that the corporate was inside “just a few weeks” of resuming flights, but Recent Shepard has yet to fly since then.
“After I joined Blue, we had very, little or no revenue,” Smith said on the June conference. “Now we’ve a whole lot of hundreds of thousands of dollars of revenue in addition to billions of dollars in orders, so we’re in a superb position.”
There had been recent signs, though, that Blue Origin’s growth was slowing. In early September several employees reported on social media that that they had been laid off. All were recruiters, and an industry source acquainted with the layoffs said they were tied to a slower pace of hiring, and never a discount in overall workforce.
“In his six years, Bob led Blue Origin’s transformation from an R&D-focused company right into a multi-faceted space business nearing $10 billion in customer orders and over 10,000 employees,” an organization spokesperson told SpaceNews.
Smith said in his email that he had been discussing his planned departure with company founder Jeff Bezos for months, and that Bezos would individually announce his successor. Bezos, in an email shortly after Smith’s, praised the departing CEO.
“Under Bob’s leadership, Blue has grown to several billion dollars in sales orders, with a considerable backlog for our vehicles and engines,” Bezos wrote.
Bezos announced that Dave Limp would take over as chief executive of Blue Origin. Limp announced in August he planned to step down as senior vice chairman for devices and services at Amazon, also founded by Bezos. Limp’s portfolio at Amazon included Project Kuiper, Amazon’s broadband web constellation in development, in addition to consumer devices like Kindle and Echo.
“I’ve worked closely with Dave for a few years. He’s the best leader at the best time for Blue,” Bezos wrote. “Dave is a proven innovator with a customer-first mindset and extensive experience leading and scaling large, complex organizations. Dave has an excellent sense of urgency, brings energy to the whole lot, and helps teams move very fast.”
“He has extensive experience within the high-tech industry and growing highly complex organizations,” a Blue Origin spokesperson said of Limp in an announcement.