Despite recent launch success, Blue Origin says it's laying off 10% of workers

Feb. 13 (UPI) -- Jeff Bezos's space company Blue Origin announced on Thursday it will be laying off 10% of its staff less than a month after carrying out arguably its biggest success to date.

Blue Origin's CEO Dave Limp broke the news about the cutbacks with an email to employees with more details about their job status.

The announcement comes after the successful launch of the Jan. 16 launch of its New Glenn heavy-lift rocket from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The arrival of the New Glenn rocket is expected to allow Blue Origin to better compete against Elon Musk's SpaceX and stay a major player for upcoming NASA Artemis missions to the moon.

"Our primary focus in 2025 and beyond is to scale our manufacturing output and launch cadence with speed, decisiveness, and efficiency for our customers," Limp said in the email, according to Florida Today.

"We grew and hired incredibly fast in the last few years and with that growth came more bureaucracy and less focus than we needed. It also became clear that the makeup of our organization must change to ensure our roles are best aligned with executing these priorities."

Limp said job losses will hit engineering, research and development, and program/project management. He said Blue Origin will also be thinning out "layers of management."

Indeed, Blue Origin grew at a breakneck pace, going from 1,000 employees in 2018 to 6,000 by 2022, before topping out at 14,000 this year, according to GeekWire.

Ambitions at Blue Origin, however, remain high with Limp announcing at a space industry conference earlier this week that it plans its next New Glenn flight for the spring and spending an uncrewed lander to the moon sometime this year.

"I'm very confident that we can get on the moon this year," Limp told the conference on Wednesday, according to Quartz.com.