Consequently, Blue Origin is laying off 10% of its workforce, or more than 1,000 employees, citing the need to restructure the company and reduce bureaucracy.
Dave Limp, CEO of Blue Origin, informed employees on February 13 about the layoffs, which he said would be distributed throughout the company, including management.
“Over the past few years, we have grown and hired incredibly fast, and with that growth has come more bureaucracy and less focus than we needed,” he wrote in an email to employees after the meeting in which he announced the layoffs.
“It also became clear that the structure of our organization needed to change to better align our roles with the delivery of these priorities. Unfortunately, this has resulted in the elimination of some positions in engineering, research and development, and program/project management, and a thinning of our management levels,” he said.
The layoffs and their scale surprised many. They came less than a month after the company successfully launched its New Glenn rocket on its maiden flight. The company had been ramping up rocket production while also flying New Shepard suborbital flights and working on other projects, including the Blue Moon lunar lander and the Blue Ring orbital vehicle.
Limp said in an email that the layoffs came after the company’s senior management developed an annual operating plan and “growth strategy” for 2025.
“Our primary focus in 2025 and beyond is to increase production volumes and run at pace with speed, determination, and efficiency for our customers,” he wrote.
The announcement came a day after Limp’s 27th Annual Commercial Space Conference speech. In a fireside chat during the event, he didn’t mention any planned layoffs but noted that company founder Jeff Bezos brought him in in late 2023 to make the company more aggressive. Limp was a longtime Amazon executive working on consumer products, with no aerospace experience before joining Blue Origin.
“He said he didn’t think Blue needed another rocket scientist,” Limp said of Bezos. “We needed a little bit more organization, a little bit more determination, a little bit of manufacturing experience.”
Limp said he agrees with that assessment.
“Over the past year, we’ve made significant progress on fundamentals and acted quickly to turn us into a world-class manufacturing company and focus the company,” he said. “I think we have made some progress. We also have a lot of work to do this year.”
He said the changes had already led to personnel changes prior to these layoffs, citing differences in leadership styles.
“About half of my staff changed in the first year. That’s probably the right thing to do,” he said, without disclosing who was included. “We’ve also done some reorganizations, quite a bit, with a lot of emphasis on the operations and production side of the business, where I didn’t think it was organized as efficiently as it could be.”
“Let me add that I am extremely confident in the tremendous opportunities that lie ahead of us and have never been more optimistic about our mission,” he wrote in an email, noting that Blue Origin will still hire hundreds this year. “We will be a stronger, faster, more customer-centric company that consistently meets and exceeds our commitments.”