Blue Origin, the space company owned by Jeff Bezos, is laying off roughly 10 percent of its work force, according to an email that was sent to staff on Thursday and that was viewed by The New York Times.
The cuts, which could affect about 1,000 roles, follow several years of rapid growth and the successful launch last month of New Glenn, the company’s massive reusable rocket.
Blue Origin’s chief executive, Dave Limp, said in the email that the company had become bloated, and that the cuts would be in engineering, research and development, project management, and general managerial layers.
He added that Blue Origin’s leaders had determined that their priority for 2025 and beyond was “to scale our manufacturing output and launch cadence with speed, decisiveness and efficiency for our customers.”
Blue Origin does not disclose how many employees it has, but its work force is widely estimated to be more than 10,000 people.
Mr. Bezos, the founder of Amazon, has poured billions into Blue Origin. He has long described a vision of establishing human colonies in space, and said bringing down the cost of launching cargo into space was critical. But his company has lagged behind the development of Elon Musk’s private space company, SpaceX.
In late 2023, Mr. Bezos hired Mr. Limp, a former senior Amazon executive, to run Blue Origin and instill it with a sense of urgency. The company, flush with money from Mr. Bezos, had been in a perpetual research-and-development cycle, said Chad Anderson, a start-up investor at Space Capital.
“When you have an unlimited amount of money, you don’t have that same sense of scarcity and necessity,” Mr. Anderson said.
Employees had been bracing for layoffs for some time. Late Wednesday, they received an invitation for a virtual meeting at 7 a.m. on Thursday. In the eight-minute session, Mr. Limp announced the cuts. At 7:10, he followed up with a companywide email confirming the layoffs.
Mr. Limp said in the email that the company would still “hire hundreds of positions.”
During an appearance on Wednesday at the Commercial Space Conference in Washington, D.C., Mr. Limp was upbeat about Blue Origin and gave no hint that he was about to say goodbye to one in every 10 employees.
“We have a lot of work ahead of us, but we have made a lot of progress in the past year on the fundamentals and acting quickly and turning us into a world-class manufacturing company,” Mr. Limp said. “I think we’ve made some progress. We have a lot to do this year, too.”
The rate of manufacture of the BE-4 engines — used for Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket and the Vulcan rocket built by United Launch Alliance — has ramped up to about one a week. “And by the way, that’s going to double or triple over the next 12 to 18 months,” he added.
Blue Origin is on track for launching a lander to the moon this year, Mr. Limp said. Although this one will carry only cargo, not people, it will test technologies that will be used for a larger lander that Blue Origin is developing for NASA and its Artemis program.
“We’ve hit all our milestones,” Mr. Limp said. “We’re still on track, subject to Artemis schedule.”
Mr. Limp said that even this smaller lander would be bigger than anything else that had landed on the moon, including the landers used by NASA astronauts during the Apollo program.
Mr. Limp was also bullish on the space plans of the Trump administration, even if those space plans are not clear yet. “The increased focus on space just in the first month of this administration is great to see,” he said. “We’re obviously huge fans.”
Even if NASA pivots its attention from the moon to Mars — the preferred destination of Mr. Musk — Blue Origin’s technologies will be suited for that longer journey, too. “You can treat them a little bit like Lego bricks,” Mr. Limp said. “It turns out a manned mission to Mars or a cargo mission to Mars reuses the vast majority of these.”
