Jeff Bezos is Doubling His Time with Blue Origin

Jeff Bezos is taking his endeavors with space travel a lot more seriously now. According to people familiar with the situation who spoke to CNBC, the Amazon founder has used Wednesday afternoons to either do updates or discussions at Blue Origin.

Now Bezos will be adding Tuesday afternoons into the mix as well say the sources. This effectively doubles the amount of time he spends each with week the space company.

The billionaire has called Blue Origin his life’s most important work.

The space company is currently locked in a fierce court battle over NASA’s award of a multibillion-dollar lunar lander contract to Elon Musk’s SpaceX, a key customer of its BE-4 rocket engines.

A source had told CNBC that Bezos used to hold a companywide question-and-answer session with employees every year but had stopped doing so. Now he is turning his attention back to the company.

It was in 2017 that Bezos had said he was selling $1 billion a year of his Amazon stock to fund Blue Origin’s development. He has increased those stake sales but did not clarify what of those funds are going to the space company.

The U.S. Space Force, the military branch spun out of the Air Force in December 2019, has announced this weke its next batch of awards for projects related to next-gen rocket engine testing and upper-stage improvements.

The awards were granted by the Space Enterprise Consortium (SpEC), a program managed by the Space Force’s Space Systems Command.

Blue Origin, which will receive $24.3 million to develop cryogenic fluid management for the upper stage of the New Glenn rocket.

Bezos had stepped down as Amazon CEO in July to give more of his time to his space plans.

Disclaimer: We have no position in any of the companies mentioned and have not been compensated for this article.