'GUT PUNCH': Jeff Bezos reveals lessons learned from the Blue Origin rocket explosion [5:35]

Transcript

Bret: Welcome back to “Special Report.” We’re on the factory floor here at Blue Origin. Welcome back, Jeff Bezos. This is cool. This place is huge.

Jeff: Happy to be here. Happy to show you around.

Bret: Where are we standing?

Jeff: This is Blue Origin’s factory outside of Cape Canaveral. This is where we build New Glenn, our super heavy lift launch vehicle. It takes heavy payloads into Earth orbit and to take things to the surface of the Moon.

Bret: What is the coolest thing in here?

Jeff: There’s a lot in here. What you’re seeing are the tanks being made. We do something called friction stir welding, which is an amazing process. We stir the aluminum together for high-performance welds. These are giant tanks that carry the propellants: liquid oxygen, liquid natural gas, and liquid hydrogen. Talking about the first stage or the second stage, here there’s about eight different boosters. The first stage is in production, maybe something like 20 different second stages in production.

Bret: All right. May 28th, 2026. Where are you when you get the call about the explosion?

Jeff: I was at somebody’s high school graduation ceremony. It was just ending, so I got on a plane and I flew to Cape Canaveral and found out about the accident, the explosion. We had an all-hands meeting. It was a rough day for everybody.

Bret: You called it a gut punch.

Jeff: Yes. We have 15,000 people at Blue Origin working hard every day. We all felt that gut punch. Very rough. I got up on stage and said, “God knows how to appropriately price his goods. What we’re doing is hard and it’s worth it.” The team has responded amazingly. They’re killing it. By the end of the day, people were making T-shirts that say, “It’s worth it.” Now, several months later, we’re on track. We’re going to fly before the end of the year. We have not stopped production. We continue building second stages and boosters and stacking them up. So we’ll be flying again before the end of the year.

Bret: What did you learn from that? Obviously, you learned the technical stuff. What do you tell the team?

Jeff: Well, that’s when you get to see what you’re made of. Every— all of these difficult achievements throughout human history, there’s always setbacks. For Apollo, it was the tragedy of Apollo 1. They tested on the ground and the astronauts died. It was a major setback. But they rallied and saw what went wrong and made sure it never happened again. From that point forward, Apollo had a perfect safety track record. In our case, nobody got hurt. All of our procedures about keeping people safe while we’re doing hazardous operations were effective. We have the launch pad. You got a tour of it. You can see how much work is going on.

Bret: Like 24/7.

Jeff: We have a forest of cranes—more than 1,000 people there working 24/7. What it teaches you is how to rally. It teaches you—when something like that happens, you can go two ways. You can give up or double down. This team—and I’m so proud of them—they doubled down.

Bret: When you look around this place and think about your beginnings, did you think you would be here?

Jeff: No. Not at all. This is incredible. What is happening here and the possibilities, what we get to do in the future, this is a renaissance. This is a golden age of space travel. We’re at the beginning of a completely new thing. What we’ve been doing—in space travel, we, humanity, ever since the Apollo program, has been very small compared to what...

Bret: In 2025, you lost your mom, Jackie. You put this post out there. You said her grit and optimism drove you. When you walk around this place, do you hear your mom’s voice?

Jeff: I don’t know if you know this, we named the landing platform after my mom. It’s called the Jacqueline. Every time this booster comes back, it’s coming into her arms.

Bret: Speaking of names, the New Glenn. Named for John Glenn.

Jeff: That’s right.

Bret: Why did you do it?

Jeff: He’s the first American to orbit. A real hero. We named it the New Glenn. He sent me an incredibly nice letter thanking me for honoring him, naming the vehicle after him. He sent me that letter the day before he died.

Bret: Wow. It’s our 30th anniversary today. Fox News. I started in ‘98. One of the early stories, in October of ‘98. John Glenn going back to space.

Jeff: At the time, the oldest person going to space.

Bret: I have this sound bite.

Jeff: Behind me, you can see the countdown ticking and shuttle Discovery in the distance.

Bret: I covered it that day. It’s kind of ironic that I finish this day...

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