The marketplace for private space enterprises is far from free, especially with SpaceX CEO and eagerly willing Martian sperm donor Elon Musk holding the purse strings of the federal government. SpaceX’s competitors can only sit back and prepare for the loss of its government contracts. Blue Origin announced on Thursday that it will be laying off 10 percent of its workforce, around 1,400 employees.
Blue Origin’s layoffs come just a month after the New Glenn rocket’s maiden launch. The two-stage rocket is expected to launch Amazon’s Kuiper satellite constellation, a potential rival to SpaceX’s Starlink. Kuiper is led by a former Starlink vice president who was fired by Musk in 2018 and is primarily staffed by other ex-SpaceX engineers. The private space company founded by Jeff Bezos set a target of eight New Glenn launches per year.
Blue Origin employees were made aware of the layoffs in an all-hands meeting on Thursday. According to the Independent, Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp stated in a post-meeting email:
“Our primary focus in 2025 and beyond is to scale our manufacturing output and launch cadence with speed, decisiveness, and efficiency for our customers. We grew and hired incredibly fast in the last few years, and with that growth came more bureaucracy and less focus than we needed. It also became clear that the makeup of our organization must change to ensure our roles are best aligned with executing these priorities. Sadly, this resulted in eliminating some positions in engineering, R&D, and program/project management and thinning out our layers of management.”
Blue Origin’s workforce reduction isn’t the first spat of layoffs in the private space sector this year. Boeing announced it’s preparing to lay off half the workforce building the Space Launch System, NASA’s Artemis program rocket. SpaceX is seemingly solidifying its position as the dominant space venture on this planet. In 2022, Musk’s space company conducted 78 percent of launches in the United States. It’s a percentage only likely to increase with his control of the federal budget.