SPACE: Blue Origin’s massive New Glenn rocket is delayed for years. What went wrong?

During a meeting in December 2011 with then-NASA deputy administrator Lori Garver, Bezos discussed an orbital rocket capable of challenging SpaceX’s Falcon 9 booster. As Christian Davenport recounts in his book The Space Barons, Bezos told Garver at the time, “I want to tell you about my big rocket.”

The “big rocket” at the time—which would become known publicly as New Glenn more than half a decade later—was not quite so big as New Glenn is envisioned today. Rather than being powered by seven BE-4 engines and towering nearly as tall as NASA’s famed Saturn V rocket, Bezos originally envisioned a more modest-sized rocket comparable to the Falcon 9 or United Launch Alliance’s single-stick Delta IV. In some iterations, New Glenn had just three main engines.

This would have represented a more incremental step for a launch company that has yet to put a gram of material into orbit. But instead of offering a waypoint between New Shepard and a massive orbital rocket, Bezos ultimately opted to jump right to the massive, 313-foot-tall version. “It’s like if NASA had gone straight from Alan Shepard to the Saturn V rocket, but then also had to make the Saturn V reusable,” one former Blue Origin employee said.

Instead of crawl-walk-run, Bezos asked his engineering team to begin sprinting toward the launch pad.

The SpaceX formula of taking smaller steps but iterating rapidly is paying off much better than Blue Origin’s attempt to take shortcuts.