Blue Origin CEO Bob Smith Resigns, Replaced By Former Amazon Executive Dave Limp

JAKARTA - Bob Smith, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Jeff Bezos' space company Blue Origin, will step down by the end of the year. He will be replaced by former Amazon executive Dave Limp, who previously led products such as Kindle.

Limp, a former senior vice president at Amazon who leads the company's consumer device unit, will become CEO of Blue Origin on December 4, according to an email from Jeff Bezos, founder of Blue Origin.

"Jeff and I have been discussing my plans for months," Smith told employees in an email sent Monday, September 25. He added that he would continue to work at the company until January 2 "to ensure a smooth transition with the new CEO.

Limp, who has worked for more than 13 years on Amazon, oversees several well-known Amazon consumer devices, such as Echo products. However, he announced his retirement last August after the division had difficulty bringing in revenue and cutting jobs.

Limp has experience in the space sector. While on Amazon, he oversees the creation of the Amazon Kuiper project, which is a network of plans for thousands of satellites that will compete with SpaceX's Starlink network.

In Blue Origin, Limp will oversee the delayed start of the company's orbital launch business, which is a potentially important source of income, and the lunar landing business, which plans to take humans to the moon for NASA towards the end of this decade.

Smith, a former executive of Honeywell Aerospace, was brought by Bezos as CEO in 2017 to help develop Blue Origin, which has now become a company focused on research and development and has become a formidable rival to SpaceX. Elon Musk's company, SpaceX, now dominates the launch and aviation industry.

While Blue Origin has achieved success with the suborbital space tourism business under Smith's leadership, the company lost to SpaceX and other companies in obtaining lucrative and well-known government contracts that are critical to Blue Origin's goal of launching humans and satellites beyond Earth's atmosphere.

The company, which was founded in 2000, has not successfully launched anything into Earth orbit, but is currently in the final stages of developing a heavy-carrying rocket called New Glenn, which is expected to challenge Falcon 9, which is SpaceX's flagship rocket, and future Starship rocket.

Blue Origin has struggled to pursue SpaceX and its joint Boeing-Lockheed company, United Launch Alliance, and has adopted the slogan "Gradatim Ferociter," meaning "step by step, actively" as they seek to accelerate development.

"Through this transition, I am sure we will remain focused on our commitment to our customers, production schedules, and implementation quickly and operational excellence," Bezos said in his notes on Limp appointments.