Blue Origin acquires Honeybee Robotics
January 28, 2022
By Chris Forrester
Honeybee Robotics is to become a wholly owned subsidiary of Blue Origin. A deal between Honeybee’s parent organisation, Ensign-Bickford Industries, and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, is expected to close in mid-February. Financial terms were not disclosed.
Since 1983, Honeybee has delivered more than 1,000 advanced projects to government and industrial customers in the spacecraft, planetary exploration, defense robotics, medical devices, mining, oil and gas, and utility infrastructure sectors. Its innovative, reliable, and literally ground-breaking robotic systems operate throughout space: in commercial launch vehicles and satellites and doing innovative work on the Moon, Mars and Titan.
Importantly, Honeybee’s extensive experience in planetary robotics and mechanisms, drills, motors, actuators, drive electronics, and specialised space mechanisms is complementary to Blue Origin’s system capability’s goal of making space flight routine, and vision of opening space resources to benefit Earth.
Honeybee’s current business will continue to operate ‘business as usual’ with no notable changes to its brand, leaders, customer commitments, products, services or processes. Over time, the combined capabilities of Honeybee and Blue Origin aims to create new opportunities, efficiencies, and innovations as they work together to develop space to benefit Earth, said a company statement.
“We’ve been building Honeybee’s capabilities and brand for almost 40 years,” said Kiel Davis, President of Honeybee Robotics. “Joining Blue Origin is a major step forward for us. We thank the entire EBI family for their support over the last four and a half years. With Blue Origin we look forward to further expanding our capacity to meet the most exciting challenges in next-generation space transportation, space mobility, space destinations, and planetary science and exploration.”
“We’re beyond excited to welcome Honeybee Robotics to our team,” added Brent Sherwood, SVP/Advanced Development Programs for Blue Origin. “We know Honeybee’s leadership. We value the company’s brand, talent, unique expertise, and product lines. And we know that together we will make bold things possible.”