NASA and the Private Sector - Page 193

Jeff Bezos flew to space late last month, but his company has lost top talent since the billionaire space founder came back to Earth.

At least 11 key leaders and senior engineers have left Blue Origin this summer, CNBC has learned, with many moving on in the weeks after Bezos’ spaceflight.

Two of the engineers, Nitin Arora and Lauren Lyons, this week announced jobs at other space companies: Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Firefly Aerospace, respectively.

Others quietly updated their LinkedIn pages over the past few weeks.

Each unannounced departure was confirmed to CNBC by people familiar with the matter. Those departures include: New Shepard senior vice president Steve Bennett, chief of mission assurance Jeff Ashby (who retired), New Glenn senior director Bob Ess, New Glenn senior finance manager Bill Scammell, senior manager of production testing Christopher Payne, senior propulsion design engineer Dave Sanderson, senior HLS human factors engineer Rachel Forman, propulsion engineer Rex Gu, and rocket engine development engineer Gerry Hudak.

Those who announced they were leaving Blue Origin did not specify why, but frustration with executive management and a slow, bureaucratic structure is often cited in employee reviews on job site Glassdoor.

A company spokesperson emphasized Blue Origin’s growth in a statement to CNBC.

“Blue Origin grew by 850 people in 2020 and we have grown by another 650 so far in 2021. In fact, we’ve grown by nearly a factor of four over the past three years. We continue to fill out major leadership roles in manufacturing, quality, engine design, and vehicle design. It’s a team we’re building and we have great talent,” the spokesperson said.

Some of the engineers who left were part of Blue Origin’s astronaut lunar lander program. Bezos’ company lost its bid for a valuable NASA development contract in April when SpaceX was announced as the sole awardee under the space agency’s Human Landing System program, winning a $2.9 billion contract.

But, despite the Government Accountability Office last month denying Blue Origin’s protest of NASA’s decision, the company has continued to escalate its fight to be a part of the HLS program. Blue Origin first launched a public relations offensive against SpaceX’s Starship rocket and then, on Monday, sued NASA in federal court.

A $10,000 bonus

The company has nearly 4,000 employees around the U.S., with its headquarters in Kent, Washington, near Seattle, as well as facilities in Cape Canaveral, Florida; Van Horn, Texas, and Huntsville, Alabama.

Ten days after Bezos’ July 20 spaceflight, Blue Origin gave all its full-time employees a $10,000, no-strings-attached cash bonus, multiple people familiar with the situation told CNBC. None of Blue Origin’s contractors received it. The company confirmed the bonus, with a spokesperson noting that it was intended as a “thank you” for achieving the milestone of launching people to space.

Two people told CNBC that internally the bonus was perceived as the company’s leadership attempting to entice talent to stay, in response to the number of employees filing notices to leave after the launch.

A look at Glassdoor reveals a sharp disparity in employee satisfaction with Blue Origin’s leadership when compared with that of other top space companies. According to Glassdoor, just 15% of Blue Origin employees approve of CEO Bob Smith — versus 91% for Elon Musk at SpaceX or 77% for Tory Bruno at United Launch Alliance.

The HLS fight

NASA’s Human Landing System program is one of the critical pieces of the agency’s plan, known as Artemis, to return U.S. astronauts to the surface of the moon.

Last year, NASA handed out nearly $1 billion in concept development contracts for HLS — with SpaceX receiving $135 million, Leidos’ subsidiary Dynetics receiving $253 million and Blue Origin receiving $579 million. The space agency then expected to award two of those three companies hardware development contracts this year. However, following a shortfall in requested funding for HLS from Congress, NASA decided to give only SpaceX a contract, worth about $2.9 billion.

Blue Origin and Dynetics each quickly filed protests with the U.S. Government Accountability Office, which halted NASA’s work on the program until the protests could be resolved. The GAO on July 30 upheld NASA’s decision. On Aug. 16, Blue Origin took its battle a step further, suing NASA in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims.

NASA has paid $300 million of its SpaceX contract so far, with the payment made on the day the GAO denied the protests. However, the space agency’s work on HLS has once again halted — this time due to the Blue Origin lawsuit, according to court filings Thursday — and will not resume until Nov. 1.

Major delays

Blue Origin has struggled to deliver on multiple major programs since Bezos hired Smith as CEO in 2017. Bezos founded the company in 2000, with the goal of creating “a future where millions of people are living and working in space to benefit Earth.” Delays — although common in the industry, in which the adage “space is hard” is persistently heard — have pushed back Bezos’ vision, highlighted by the departure of Blue Origin’s chief operating officer late last year.

Bezos launched to the edge of space as one of the members of the first crew onboard Blue Origin’s reusable New Shepard rocket. While the company has not disclosed pricing, New Shepard competes with Virgin Galactic in the realm of suborbital space tourism, with Blue Origin having sold nearly $100 million worth of tickets for future passenger flights. Although the first crewed New Shepard launch was a smooth success, Blue Origin’s leadership had previously expected the rocket to begin launching people by the end of 2017.

New Glenn is the reusable, next-generation rocket that Blue Origin is developing but has yet to launch. Originally slated for an inaugural flight in 2020, the first New Glenn is not expected to lift off until the fourth quarter of 2022. That’s despite Blue Origin receiving $255.5 million from the U.S. Air Force to help develop the rocket. But the Pentagon did not choose New Glenn for further contracts last year, instead selecting SpaceX and ULA for multiple awards, cumulatively worth billions of dollars — a loss that Blue Origin cited when it announced New Glenn’s delay.

Blue Origin’s third major program is its stable of rocket engines, headlined by the BE-4, which will power its New Glenn rocket. The company previously said that its BE-4 engines would be “ready for flight in 2017.”

However, four years later, development issues and a lack of hardware for testing quickly mean Blue Origin has yet to deliver its first flight engines, ArsTechnica reported earlier this month. The company is pushing to have two BE-4 engines ready by the end of this year. Notably, BE-4s are important beyond Blue Origin, as ULA signed a deal to use the engines to power its Vulcan rockets, choosing Blue Origin over Aerojet Rocketdyne as its supplier. ULA is pushing to have its first Vulcan rocket ready to launch by the end of this year, and Blue Origin’s BE-4 engines are expected to be a — if not the — final piece added before launch.

Bezos has spent the majority of his time in the past two decades focused on Amazon, but along the way has steadily sold pieces of his stake in the tech giant to fund Blue Origin’s development — to the tune of $1 billion a year, or possibly more. Last month, Bezos stepped down as Amazon CEO, with many in the space industry expecting him to spend more time focusing on his space company.

On Tuesday, Blue Origin used a modular transport to roll its first stainless steel test tank to Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. This tank is part of the company's efforts—under the codename "Project Jarvis"—to develop a fully reusable upper stage for Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket.

Ars revealed the existence of this effort last month, and we are now publishing the first photos of the tank prototype. A source at Blue Origin said this tank could start to undergo a series of tests to determine its strength and ability to hold pressurized propellants as soon as next month.

Although Blue Origin has not publicly discussed this effort to build a reusable upper stage for the New Glenn rocket, sources said the company's primary goal is to bring down the overall launch cost of the New Glenn rocket. The vehicle's large upper stage, which has a 7-meter diameter and two BE-3U engines, is costly. Making New Glenn fully reusable is necessary for Blue Origin to compete with SpaceX's Starship launch system.

The tank project is one aspect of the reusable upper stage program, and the other is selecting and finalizing a design for the second stage. Both of these projects, operating within Blue Origin's Advanced Development Programs unit, are making progress.

Project Jarvis encompasses the tank program, which is intended to rapidly prototype a propellant tank to withstand the rigors of multiple launches and re-entries. The company's engineers are studying the use of stainless steel as a material for these tanks, as SpaceX has chosen to do with its Starship booster and upper stage. Stainless steel is cheaper and better able to withstand atmospheric heating during re-entry, but it's about five times heavier than composites.

In an effort to move quickly and test whether SpaceX's iterative design philosophy can be mimicked, Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos has empowered the engineers leading Project Jarvis to innovate in an environment unfettered by rigorous management and paperwork processes. This has led to the rapid development of the tank rolled to Launch Complex 36 on Tuesday.

At the same time, another team has been studying three different approaches for the design of a re-entry vehicle, sources said. One is to fit the upper stage with large wings so that it would look and function something like a spaceplane, separating from the first stage, delivering its payload, and then returning to a runway.

In the past, Bezos has expressed doubts about wings. "Some people like wings," he told Ars during a factory tour in 2016. "Some people like parachutes. None of these are bad. The reason I like vertical landing is because it scales so well. With wings, they scale pretty well to a certain size, but they end up being a lot of dead weight to carry."

The second approach involves using an aerospike engine that would double as a heat shield during re-entry through Earth's atmosphere. This approach has promise, but it likely would necessitate the design and construction of a new engine, which would be an expensive and time-consuming process.

The final approach is similar to SpaceX's Starship concept: land the vehicle vertically using a combination of flaps and propulsive burns. This appears to be the leading contender among the three approaches, and Blue Origin is expected to make a final decision before the end of this year.

Regardless of the final design, the propellant tanks for each of the three designs would be cylindrical, allowing the Project Jarvis team to move ahead with its development program. Sources indicated that the construction of this test tank has proceeded much more rapidly than other programs at Blue Origin, which may validate Bezos' experiment with rapid, iterative development.

"Jeff wants to heavily emphasize the ferociter in our motto now," one source said of Blue Origin's Gradatim Ferociter motto, which means step by step, ferociously.

On August 28 2021 08:49 ZerOCoolSC2 wrote:

This is low-brow trolling. NASA should just tell SpaceX to continue working and then just launch the damn thing. This is getting ridiculous.

On August 28 2021 19:53 ZerOCoolSC2 wrote:

I know. Still think they should just go rogue lol. Nothing is going to change. This is such an obvious waste of time and money.