Space: Blue Origin plans to lay off around 1,400 employees

Blue Origin is laying off one in ten employees: US billionaire Jeff Bezos' aerospace company wants to significantly reduce its workforce.

Blue Origin boss Dave Limp announced the mass redundancies in a conference call attended by the entire workforce, reports the British news agency Reuters. According to the report, around 1,400 of the almost 14,000 employees will lose their jobs.

There is no easy way to announce something like this, Limp said in the ten-minute conference. The company has recently achieved an important success. "But if you look at the foundation of the company and what we need to accomplish in the next three to five years, we've come to the painful realization that we're not set up for the success we wanted to have."

SpaceX dominates commercial space travel

The two most important goals for the company are to ramp up production of the New Glenn heavy-lift rocket and to increase the rocket's launch cadence. Otherwise, Blue Origin would not be able to compete with SpaceX, which currently dominates commercial space travel. To achieve this, the company needs a culture that is "fast, nimble, decisive and very focused on our customers", said Limp.

Founder Jeff Bezos had brought Limp from the internet company Amazon to Blue Origin as CEO in 2023. Limp was tasked with streamlining various business areas of the space company and, above all, driving forward the development of New Glenn. The rocket, named after US astronaut John Glenn, successfully completed its maiden flight. The launch had previously been postponed due to a technical problem.

It took more than ten years to develop the approximately 100-meter-high New Glenn. The rocket should one day be able to transport around 45 tons of material into low Earth orbit. Similar to its competitor SpaceX, Blue Origin also wants to land the first rocket stage so that it can be reused.

(wpl)