Aerospace company Blue Origin, which was founded by Jeff Bezos, confirmed its longtime CEO is stepping down and a former Amazon executive is coming on board to take his place.

Bob Smith joined Blue Origin from Honeywell Aerospace in 2017 leading the burgeoning company through its space tourism and heavy lift rocket pursuits that include the massive New Glenn rocket factory on the Space Coast.

In an email to the Orlando Sentinel attributed to a Blue Origin spokesperson, the company said Tuesday it was bringing on board Dave Limp beginning in December and that Smith would remain through Jan. 2 ” to ensure a smooth transition.”

Blue Origin continues New Glenn puzzle progress for Cape Canaveral launches

“Dave is a proven innovator with a customer-first mindset,” the email stated. “He has extensive experience in the high-tech industry and growing highly complex organizations, including leading Amazon’s Kuiper, Kindle, Alexa, Zoox, Fire TV and many other businesses.”

Amazon had previously announced Limp was stepping down before the end of the year.

The email gave Smith his due, noting that he had transformed Blue Origin from a research and development company into what it is today with close to $10 billion in customer orders and more than 10,000 employees.

Blue Origin wins NASA contract to join SpaceX for moon landings

Blue Origin projects also include contracts with NASA leading a team to develop and second human landing system for Artemis missions to the moon in addition to SpaceX’s Starship. It’s also pursuing efforts to turn lunar regolith into solar power cells through a process it has dubbed Blue Alchemist, part of what NASA calls In-Situ Resource Utilization.

Smith’s tenure wasn’t without bumps including New Glenn missing out on lucrative Department of Defense contracts to United Launch Alliance and SpaceX, which hampered progress on its development.

That includes the new BE-4 engines that also power ULA’s new Vulcan Centaur rockets that have yet to launch, although Vulcan’s first launch with Blue Origin’s engines could come before December.

While Vulcan uses two BE-4 engines, New Glenn needs seven of them, and with at least five Vulcan flights on tap for 2024, it’s unclear when New Glenn will finally get its first flight from nearby Cape Canaveral Space Force Station where Blue Origin has also built out a complex at Launch Complex 36.

There is plenty of business waiting for New Glenn, though, when it does finally get off the ground. That includes customer Amazon with its need to launch more than 1,600 of its Project Kuiper satellites before summer 2026.

Amazon has contracted with ULA and Blue Origin as well as Arianespace for up to 92 launches across all three companies’ rockets to get 3,236 of the satellites into space.

Blue Origin’s take is 12 launches with the option of 15 additional on the voluminous New Glenn, which features a fairing more than 5 feet wider than SpaceX’s Falcon 9 or ULA’s new Vulcan rockets.

New Glenn has also been tapped by NASA to launch a planetary exploration spacecraft to study Mars’ magnetosphere and has signed a contract with satellite company Telesat to launch its hardware.

Still grounded, Blue Origin details what went wrong on New Shepard launch

One highlight of Smith’s operations, though, was the spate of successful New Shepard suborbital space tourism flights from its West Texas facilities.

Bezos himself was on board the first launch of the small rocket in July 2021 that took him and three others on a short trip past the Karman line — about 62 miles high — the internationally recognized altitude for someone having gone into space, the same type of trip done for the human spaceflights.

Over the next 13 months, the company would manage five more launches with passengers taking up 32 humans, including one who flew twice, into space.

Three of its customers have been from Central Florida with Winter Park power couple Marc and Sharon Hagle who flew in March 2022 followed by Brevard County millionaire Steve Young in August 2022.

All was going well before an uncrewed version of the rocket ended up exploding during liftoff, and while the capsule safely proved its emergency escape system would work, the Federal Aviation Administration grounded New Shepard. The FAA has yet to clear it for a return to flight.