Jeff Bezos has indicated that his aerospace company, Blue Origin, will probably go public within a few years. This comes on the heels of a recent incident where one of its $150 million rockets exploded, which certainly set back the company’s progress in competing with Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
According to Bezos, the successful completion of a $10 billion funding round last month—marking the company’s first time taking on outside investors, along with a substantial $2 billion investment from him—suggests that a public offering is on the horizon.
“I have a clearer vision of Blue Origin’s financial future now,” Bezos shared during an interview with Fox News’ “Special Report” at the company’s facility in Florida.
He noted that the ability to secure this funding implies that “it likely makes sense for Blue Origin to become a public entity at some point,” though he mentioned that a listing probably won’t take place “for several years.”
Since launching Blue Origin in 2000, Bezos has invested approximately $28 billion of his own money into the venture. Blue Origin provides commercial launch services, and is also in the business of building payload-carrying rockets, lunar landers, and rocket engines.
The recent funding round has valued Blue Origin at around $140 billion, as per a report from the Wall Street Journal.
In terms of finances, Blue Origin generated about $800 million in revenue last year and anticipates earnings of around $1.4 billion this year. The company projects that revenue might exceed $30 billion by the year 2030.
To compete more effectively with SpaceX’s expanding operations, Blue Origin aims to increase the number of launches for its New Glenn rocket. However, a recent test launch setback, which resulted in the destruction of both the rocket and the launchpad, has been a significant challenge for the company. Fortunately, the test was unmanned.
Bezos has mentioned that the New Glenn rocket is slated to return to flying in December.
Meanwhile, SpaceX achieved a notable public listing in June, which turned Musk into the world’s first trillionaire.
In a somewhat embarrassing incident this spring, Blue Origin miscalculated a satellite’s orbit during a launch, which caused the client’s stock to fall. They had launched the satellite from Cape Canaveral, but it didn’t reach the intended altitude, leading to a nearly 12% drop in AST SpaceMobile’s stock price.
Bezos is also focused on plans for a lunar colony, believing that lunar soil could help in manufacturing solar cells and that oxygen produced on the moon could be used as rocket propellant. “We’ll go to Mars. We’ll do all the other things. But we need to go to the moon first,” he explained in the interview, while referencing Musk’s Mars ambitions. “It won’t just be a mission and leave,” he added, envisioning a sustainable lunar base.
