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Blue Origin CEO Bob Smith speaks during a question and answer session at the launch of the Kuiper Satellite Constellation project on April 5, 2022 in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Blue Origin announced Monday that Smith will step down from his position in January 2024.
CNN –
Jeff Bezos’ space tourism and rocket company is replacing its chief executive with a longtime Amazon executive.
Blue Origin’s current CEO Bob Smith – a former Honeywell executive who took over the position in 2017 – will step down and make way for Dave Limp, Amazon’s senior vice president of devices and services, a Blue Origin spokesman said in a statement Monday.
In the statement, Blue Origin said Limp is “a proven innovator with a customer-centric mindset.” He has extensive experience in the high-tech industry and in building “highly complex organizations” – including Amazon’s satellite business, Project Kuiper.
The company also noted that Smith led Blue Origin’s transformation from “an R&D-focused company to a diverse space company with nearly $10 billion in customer orders and over 10,000 employees.”
According to the company, Limp’s first day at Blue Origin will be December 4th. However, Smith will remain in office until January 2nd “to ensure a smooth transition,” the statement said.
Blue Origin has been working for more than a decade to develop a suborbital rocket and spacecraft called New Shepard that can carry paying customers and scientific experiments to the edge of space. Bezos was one of the passengers on the company’s first successful manned space flight in 2021. Since then, New Shepard has completed five additional missions with humans on board.
However, the vehicle has not returned to flight due to the failure of an unmanned science mission in September 2022.
Blue Origin has several other high-profile projects in the works. It is developing a heavy-lift rocket called New Glenn that is powerful enough to reach Earth orbit, with the aim of competing with SpaceX for satellite launch contracts. The engines developed for New Glenn, called BE-4, will also power the new Vulcan rocket being developed by United Launch Alliance, a joint venture between Lockheed Martin and Boeing.
Blue Origin struggled to deliver the BE-4 engines, leading to months of delays. But ULA now expects this year to see the first launch of its BE-4-powered Vulcan Centaur rocket, sending a NASA-backed spacecraft to the moon.
Additionally, Blue Origin won a long-awaited contract for NASA’s lunar exploration program – Artemis – in May, receiving $3.5 billion to develop a spacecraft capable of carrying astronauts to the lunar surface.