Blue Origin is the billionaire’s midlife crisis turned aerospace company, except the crisis never ends and the rockets rarely fly.

Jeff Bezos poured billions into it, built gleaming facilities in Texas and Florida, and wrapped it all in the slogan “Gradatim Ferociter”, Latin for “slowly, ferociously.” The “slowly” part they nailed. The “ferociously” part remains theoretical.

New Shepard, the little suborbital hop machine, is the only vehicle that’s actually flown paying passengers. It works fine for fifteen-minute joyrides, and it gave Bezos his cowboy-hat photo op in space. But it’s a side show. Nobody builds a trillion-dollar Amazon fortune just to run a space tourism carnival. The real test was supposed to be New Glenn, the big orbital launcher. It has been “two years away” for most of the past decade, sliding down timelines while SpaceX went from expendable Falcon 9s to landing boosters in their sleep. New Glenn still hasn’t made orbit.

Blue Origin’s most notorious contribution to the launch sector isn’t rockets, it’s missed deliveries. The BE-4 engine, promised as the great methane-burning alternative to Russian RD-180s, was years late. United Launch Alliance had to sit on its Vulcan rocket twiddling its thumbs because Bezos couldn’t ship engines on schedule. Vulcan finally flew, but it exposed Blue Origin as a supplier you pray you don’t depend on.

The company has kept itself relevant through contracts rather than performance. NASA threw it money for lunar landers just to avoid giving everything to Musk, and the Pentagon hands out studies to keep the illusion of competition alive. Bezos has the bankroll to keep the lights on indefinitely, and in Washington that counts for something. A billionaire-backed company is never going to run out of runway, even if the rockets never leave the pad.

So Blue Origin is not a launch leader, it is a hobby with unlimited funding. It has brilliant engineers, stunning facilities, and the patience of a monastery. What it doesn’t have is cadence, urgency, or a record of delivering anything beyond PowerPoint renders.

SpaceX moves fast and breaks things. Blue moves slowly and breaks schedules. The only ferocity is in the PR.