NASA and the Private Sector - Page 200

On October 01 2021 22:44 ZerOCoolSC2 wrote:
Well. There's a stark contrast between SpaceX and BO but I didn't know it was this stark. I wonder when the bombshell drops that SpaceX is just as terrible for any person not white and male.

It seems like every day, headlines for BO just gets worse and worse.

On October 02 2021 01:25 ZerOCoolSC2 wrote:

I never mentioned the SpaceX CEO but you're right on the other accounts. From what I can tell from their streams and Tim Dodd's interview, people seem to enjoy working there, even if it's hard work with how fast they operate. I'd still rather work there than BO and that was before this essay was released.

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin is suffering from an elevated turnover rate, CNBC has learned, with the space company losing talent primarily from CEO Bob Smith’s pressure to return to the office.

A Blue Origin spokesperson told CNBC that attrition “has never exceeded 12.7%” on an annualized rate, which measures personnel losses over the 12 months.

While that’s notably above the company’s typical attrition of 8% to 9% a year, multiple people familiar with the situation told CNBC that, measuring from the start of the calendar year, attrition has already exceeded 20% for 2021 – noting that Blue Origin’s lower rate includes months of data before the recent surge of employees leaving.

BE-4, the centerpiece of Blue Origin’s stable of rocket engines, was supposed to be ready by 2017, but a myriad of development issues mean the company has yet to deliver its first flight-ready engines. Notably, the BE-4 program is important beyond the company, as ULA signed on to use the engines to power its Vulcan rockets, choosing Blue Origin over Aerojet Rocketdyne as its supplier – with ULA long-serving as a trusted launch provider for the Pentagon’s valuable and classified spacecraft.

The ULA contract specified that Blue Origin would delivered the first two flight-ready BE-4 engines by April 2020, a person familiar with the deal told CNBC. But, in early 2019, the company’s engines team presented an update to Smith and every component of the BE-4 engine had a technical issue associated with it, that person said. The company has yet to deliver those flight-ready BE-4 engines to ULA.

Blue Origin is also locked in a fierce court battle, after having lost NASA’s award of a multi-billion dollar lunar lander contract to SpaceX.

Pressure from delays and contract losses might explain why some see Smith’s leadership style as gruff or heavy-handed. But one person close to the CEO emphasized a disparity between Smith and the expectations of the largely Washington-based workforce – who are often very competitive, and don’t need to move to find similarly technical, well-paying jobs.

That person also highlighted disjointedness in the team around Smith. At one meeting, for instance, Smith told his team “there’s nothing you guys can teach me that I don’t already know,” according to two people with knowledge of this discussion.

Another person close to Smith told CNBC said that at one point the relationship between the CEO and his senior team deteriorated so much that Blue Origin hired a leadership consultant to examine the situation. After doing hours of one-on-one interviews with Smith’s executive team, the consultant began their feedback presentation to Smith with the line: “It is the unanimous opinion of your senior leadership team that you are a micromanager.”

Smith responded simply: “You think you’re telling me something I don’t know? I’m damn proud of it, and have no intention to change,” according to two people who were in the meeting and a third who heard about his comments after the fact.

On October 02 2021 08:22 ZerOCoolSC2 wrote:
BO won't be solvent for much longer. Maybe SpaceX can swoop in and buy them for pennies on the dollar? That would be a nice addition to their already impressive growing capacity. What, they have 3 centers already and working on a 4th? The rig as well.

The rocket was originally slated for its inaugural flight in 2020, but was delayed until at least the fourth quarter of 2022. A person familiar with the rocket’s development progress said that goal is extremely optimistic, putting New Glenn’s inaugural launch at 2024 or later.

About three years ago, Blue Origin officials knew they were behind, failing to deliver on their founder's grandiose vision.

With Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos had long talked about building a world-class space transportation company and had even gone so far as to trademark "Build a Road to Space." But despite being nearly two decades old, Blue Origin had not built a road to space, nor even launched an orbital rocket.

Meanwhile, the rocket company founded by Bezos' rival, Elon Musk, had establishing itself as the most dominant launch company in the world. By the fall of 2018, SpaceX was well on its way to launching a record 21 rockets in a single year, had debuted the Falcon Heavy, and was starting to seriously reuse first stage boosters.

"Blue is kind of lazy compared to SpaceX," one Blue Origin executive admitted in an internal memo in late 2018.

These were not easy facts for Blue Origin's leadership to contemplate. But they realized that if Blue Origin was going to become a great launch company, it should learn from the best. So in the late summer of 2018, as Bob Smith marked his first anniversary as chief executive of Blue Origin, he hired a management consulting firm called Avascent to assess SpaceX's strengths and weaknesses.

After the firm completed its analysis, the senior leadership team at Blue Origin received a briefing. Those dozen or so senior managers took notes. And as part of the exercise, they wrote down takeaways from the meeting as well as ideas for Blue Origin to better compete with SpaceX. These nine pages of notes were then compiled and delivered to Smith on Nov. 1, 2018, under the heading: "Avascent Briefing Notes from Senior Team."

Ars recently obtained screenshots of these notes. They offer a frank, revealing portrait of Blue Origin's struggles to compete with SpaceX at the time, and the efforts executives considered undertaking to catch up. In hindsight, they also underscore Blue Origin's failure to address some of these deficiencies. Nearly three years later, SpaceX is a bigger market leader than it was in 2018, with Blue Origin lagging further behind, its road to space yet unpaved.

The executives also grappled with SpaceX's ability to hire young engineers, get them to work long hours, and be high performers. The Avascent presentation found that young engineers viewed SpaceX as the "Harvard of rocketry," and that helped SpaceX attract the best and the brightest students.

"SpaceX uses younger employees to great effect," an executive wrote. "Blue is extremely picky with our intern and new grad programs accepting only 1.7 percent of applications. We could do better taking on more young people faster, knowing we may increase churn."

The Blue Origin leaders also noted that Musk's vision for settling Mars has served to motivate his current employees and inspire future generations. Perhaps Blue Origin could do something similar with the Moon, one executive suggested.

Blue Origin should also reconsider how it compensates employees, some members of leadership said. SpaceX generally paid at or below market rates, but it offered employees private stock options that have historically risen to become a valuable part of compensation. Blue Origin, by contrast, paid higher salaries, but its options were worth much less.

“I would like to see us change how we reward teams and individuals for company or project level success," one executive said. "Dinners, shirts and parties can only get us so far. I think real and meaningful financial incentives for Blue employees can help. While not discussed in the briefing I know several current and former SpaceX employees who will tell you they worked hard/harder due to both the company expectation and the financial incentives they received in the form of options. They know their work drove up the value of their options."

SpaceX is also known for iterative design, a process by which engineers spend less time studying and designing problems, and more time building and testing solutions. This philosophy has been executed writ large with the Starship program, in South Texas, where SpaceX has blown up half a dozen prototypes during cryogenic testing and landing attempts.

While it may produce spectacular failures, iterative design generally allows for a program to move more quickly, and by seeking faults during real-world tests, results in a more robust final version of a vehicle.

"I believe we study a little too much and do too little," one executive wrote. "More test [rather than] more analysis will allow us to progress more quickly, iterate, and eventually succeed."

Another senior leader expressed admiration for what SpaceX has accomplished through iterative design. "They were able to actually implement the concept of iterative design and development in aerospace, which is something many companies talk about but few achieve," this person wrote. "I believe Blue could de-risk future developments through moving in this direction."

The Blue Origin executives also noted how SpaceX embraces its failures, and how its willingness to fail publicly has enchanted the space community. For example, in 2017, SpaceX released a video on YouTube of its failed attempts to land the Falcon 9 rocket on YouTube. The video was titled, "How Not to Land an Orbital Rocket Booster." It has been viewed nearly 27 million times.

We should “develop a campaign that gets the public and industry on our side much like SpaceX has done with their transparency in mission failure which has been an effective customer relations tactic to get the industry, customers, and public behind them, rooting for their success," an executive suggested. "They are effectively saying it’s okay to fail because that is how you innovate. Develop a strategy that focuses on highlighting our innovations and failures, and how we are learning from that."

NASA will not make an official announcement for weeks or months, but two sources say the space agency is moving several astronauts from Boeing's Starliner spacecraft onto SpaceX's Crew Dragon vehicle for upcoming missions to the International Space Station.

The assignments are not final—they have yet to go through the formal approval process of the Multilateral Crew Operations Panel, which includes all international partners—but sources say NASA's rookie astronauts who have not yet flown to space will move off the Boeing vehicle due to its ongoing delays.

The most likely scenario is that Nicole Mann, Josh Cassada, and Jeannette Epps will now fly on the SpaceX Crew-5 mission, targeted for launch no earlier than August 2022 on a Falcon 9 rocket. They are likely to be joined by an international partner astronaut, probably Japan's Koichi Wakata, for the mission.

These represent substantial changes for NASA and its astronauts. Mann has been assigned to the Crew Flight Test for Starliner since August 2018. This is the pivotal flight that will take place after Boeing's upcoming uncrewed test flight of Starliner, Orbital Flight Test-2, or OFT-2. At the time of Mann's assignment, Cassada was assigned to the first operational flight of Starliner, a regular rotation mission to the space station called "Starliner-1." Epps was added to the Starliner-1 mission a year ago.

A NASA spokesperson, Kyle Herring, declined to confirm any information about the new assignments.

About two weeks ago NASA's chief of human spaceflight operations, Kathy Lueders, said teams of engineers and technicians from Boeing and NASA are continuing to assess the issue with sticky valves. A new date for this OFT-2 mission has yet to be set, and Lueders indicated one may not be set any time soon. She suggested the mission probably will slip to 2022. "My gut is that it would probably be more likely to be next year, but we're still working through that timeline," she said.

Sources confirmed there is no date yet set for the next OFT-2 launch attempt, as the spacecraft's valve issue has yet to be resolved. Realistically, this test flight may not happen before next spring. Because there is no certainty that this test flight will go flawlessly and because there will be an extensive data review following the flight, NASA has low confidence for when the first crew flight will take place.

As Mann will move from this Starliner Crew Flight Test to the SpaceX Crew-5 mission, set for no earlier than August, this suggests NASA believes the first Starliner crew mission will not take place before the second half of 2022. And there is no guarantee it will occur then.

On October 06 2021 00:44 ZerOCoolSC2 wrote:
Yeesh. BO and Boeing just cannot get their shit together. Until another company can get halfway to what SpaceX is doing, why not just give them all of the contracts? It's not a monopoly or favoritism, it's going with the most proven vehicle until someone can join them. Pretty sure NASA will cut delays in half and save a good chunk of change by doing so.

In a rural West Texas desert 5 years ago, a small team from BLUE ORIGIN conducted an in-flight escape test with #NewShepard, completing a remarkable one-year period during which 5 flights were accomplished with the same vehicle, demonstrating the functionality, reliability, and inherent safety of this new human flight system.

We celebrated this flight with our partners from NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration, United Launch Alliance (ULA), and Northrop Grumman (fka Orbital ATK).

Blue Origin was small - the company had made a conscious decision early on to operate more incrementally and with a smaller team. Blue was often compared to SpaceX, but the two couldn’t be more different – in the way they were built and the way they were operated. Between 2006 and 2015, based on publicly available headcount numbers, there is a labor gap of about 19,000 person-years between the two companies, an average of about 1900 people per year over those 10 years. Blue Origin did a lot with a small team, developing and flying five unique vehicles and developing four unique rocket engines.

We HAD the competence, the competencies, and the confidence to “start scaling the company, expand our focus to other developments, build our customer base, and turn our attention to completing a human rating certification for New Shepard and make it truly operational.”

We just needed to grow the team.

#JeffBezos and I recognized the need to bring in operational expertise to lead Blue’s next phase of growth and decided to hire a CEO. The CEO was hired in August 2017 and, after spending a year building the Advanced Development Programs business, I left the company in November 2018.

This and the other accomplishments made by the amazing team at Blue Origin during those early days are often overlooked by the headlines of today. They cannot be erased.

I remain humbled, honored, and proud to have been a part of it.