Last week saw a successful launch and landing of the Jeff Bezos-backed Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket. Blue Origin’s CEO is Dave Limp and he says that his firm is building enough hardware for “well above” a dozen flights next year with an upper limit of 24 launches. Currently Blue Origin is building one rocket a month.

Limp, speaking to journalists just prior to the launch of New Glenn and in comments reported by ars:technica, said he had been surprised at how smoothly the past 30 days had gone. “[This is] way, way less time than the first flight, and kind of on our nominal schedule,” Limp said. “You know, there’s little things that have poked their heads up, but it hasn’t been anything that’s really set us back.”

Talking about new rocket production, he added: “They’re coming off the line at one a month right now, and then we’re ramping from there,” he said of the second stages. “It would be ambitious to get to the upper level [of 24 rockets per year] but we want to be hardware rich. So, you know, we want to try to keep building as fast as we can, and then with practice I think our launch cadence can go up.”

“With rockets, it’s hard,” Limp said. “Building prototypes is easy but building a machine to make the machines in volume at rate is much harder. And so I do feel like, when I look at the factories, our engine factory in Huntsville, the rocket factory here at Rocket Park and Lunar Plant 1, I feel like when you walk the floor there’s a lot of energy.”

Key to any rocket’s flight is the vehicles engines, and Limp addressed those challenges: “You’re never done with manufacturing, but I feel on the engine front we’re incredibly strong,” he said. “We’re going to double the rate again next year. We’ve got work to do, but on second stages I feel like we’re getting there. With the booster, we’re getting there. The key is to be hardware rich, so even if some of these missions have anomalies, we can recover quickly.”

“There’s never been such a high demand for launch as there is right now, even with the cadence that SpaceX is doing,” he said. “So you know, there’s a lot of customers that are rooting for all launch companies – not just Blue, but all of us – to succeed because there’s a lot of people that are waiting in line to get to space.”

Much of that demand is coming from AST SpaceMobile which has bulk orders in place for New Glenn rockets. The current plan is for Blue Origin to launch eight to 10 times during 2026 and with each rocket carrying at least six (and perhaps eight) AST satellites.

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Categories: Blogs, Inside Satellite, Satellite

Tags: Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos