Blue Origin, LLC is an American privately funded aerospace manufacturer and spaceflight services company headquartered in Kent, Washington. Founded in 2000 by Jeff Bezos, the company, which in 2017 hired NASA Silver Snoopy Award winner Robert Smith as CEO, is developing technologies to enable private human access to space with the goal of dramatically lowering costs and increasing reliability. Blue Origin employs an incremental approach from suborbital to orbital flight, with each developmental step building on its prior work. The company motto is Gradatim Ferociter, Latin for “Step by Step, Ferociously”