It was a well-thought-out, gradual progression. And it took time to complete each step.

An old joke goes, “How do you make a small fortune in the rocket business?”

Punchline: “Start with a large fortune.”

Jeff Bezos, who became one of the richest people in the world as the founder of Amazon, is perhaps the best example of the joke’s premise that rockets are a quick and easy way to lose a lot of money.

Mr. Bezos founded Blue Origin two years before Elon Musk founded SpaceX, and Mr. Musk was then a relatively poor person, well short of billionaire status.

Since then, Mr. Bezos has poured billions of dollars of his personal wealth into Blue Origin, which has yet to launch its first rocket into orbit, while SpaceX has become the world’s leading rocket company.

Perhaps because of Mr. Bezos’ money, Blue Origin took a slower and steadier approach than SpaceX and was more similar to traditional aerospace companies like United Launch Alliance and Northrop Grumman.

Mr. Musk didn’t have the unlimited money of Mr. Bezos and SpaceX didn’t have the luxury of time. It had to be combative and nimble and put a lot of effort into itself.

Although SpaceX’s first three attempts to launch its small Falcon 1 rocket failed, the company convinced NASA that it could successfully develop a much larger Falcon 9 rocket to carry cargo to the International Space Station.

The three failures left SpaceX almost out of money. Mr. Musk’s other company, the electric car maker Tesla, was also in danger of failing, and he personally was almost bankrupt.

SpaceX has scraped together enough spare parts for a fourth Falcon 1. If that had failed, SpaceX would have died, another entry on a long list of forgotten space companies. But the fourth launch made it into orbit.

The traditional aerospace giants all had talented engineers and extensive knowledge and experience.

They could also have made big bets to reduce launch costs and disrupt the rocket business. But they didn’t try and concluded that the technical and financial risks were too great and they were already making decent profits.

United Launch Alliance engineers, for example, had been assessing the prospects of landing and reusing the booster stages of their rockets, as SpaceX is now doing with Falcon 9.

But given the small number of launches ULA conducted each year, it seemed a pointless and costly endeavor and the idea was scrapped.

This is similar to how Intel missed the opportunity to make the processors for Apple’s first iPhones in 2006. Intel assumed that there was no way this would have been profitable in the short term.

The other rocket manufacturers also didn’t expect that the cheaper launch costs would attract enough new customers to make the effort worthwhile. SpaceX did it and changed the business of space travel.

Perhaps more importantly, Mr. Musk realized that he could take advantage of the Falcon 9’s lower cost to deploy a constellation of thousands of Internet satellites – another business idea that has appealed to other companies, notably Motorola’s Iridium satellites, late in the year had not been profitable in the 1990s.

Blue Origin now seems to be gaining momentum. In December 2023, Mr. Bezos said in an interview with podcaster Lex Fridman that he had left his position as Amazon CEO to bring more energy and urgency to Blue Origin. “We need to move much faster,” he said during the interview podcast. “And we will.”

This month, Dave Limp, a longtime Amazon executive who oversaw its consumer electronics division, which includes the Echo smart speakers and Kindle e-readers, became CEO of Blue Origin.

He also spoke about making the company more flexible and decisive. “Perhaps we strived for perfection in many things,” he said in an interview last year.

If you take a little more risk, you’ll move forward “much, much faster,” he said.

Mr. Bezos recently said he expected Blue Origin to eventually make more money than Amazon. Like SpaceX, the company doesn’t envision New Glenn as a rocket just to launch satellites for customers. It sees the vehicle as a fundamental tool to support other space projects, including lunar landers and orbiting space stations.