When was blue origin founded?

Jeff Bezos set the company up in 2000, and for most of the following decade it said very little in public. The work was deliberately incremental: propulsion test articles, a private test site in West Texas and an engine programme that began with liquid hydrogen and later moved to liquefied natural gas. The company motto, Gradatim Ferociter - step by step, ferociously - was an accurate description of the pace, and it stood in sharp contrast to the publicity around its main rival.

The first hardware the public saw regularly was New Shepard, a single-stage suborbital rocket designed to carry six people above the Karman line for a few minutes of weightlessness before the capsule returns under parachutes and the booster lands upright on its legs. An uncrewed booster made that vertical landing in November 2015. Crewed flights began on 20 July 2021, with Bezos aboard the first one, and the vehicle has since flown passengers, researchers and experiments on repeat missions.

The larger programme was always New Glenn, a heavy-lift rocket named after John Glenn and powered by the company's own BE-4 engines, the same engines it sells to United Launch Alliance for Vulcan. New Glenn made its first flight in January 2025 and placed its payload in orbit, although the booster was lost on the way back. Blue Origin is also building the Blue Moon lander for NASA's Artemis programme, which moves a company once known for short hops firmly into deep-space hardware.