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Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin shedding high expertise throughout NASA lander struggle

Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin losing top talent during NASA lander fight

Jeff Bezos, owner of Blue Origin, introduces a new lunar landing module called Blue Moon during an event at the Washington Convention Center, May 9, 2019 in Washington, DC.

Mark Wilson | Getty Images

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 17 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), national security sales director Scott Jacobs, New Glenn senior director Bob Ess, New Glenn first stage senior director Tod Byquist, New Glenn senior finance manager Bill Scammell, senior manager of production testing Christopher Payne, New Shepard technical project manager Nate Chapman, senior propulsion design engineer Dave Sanderson, senior HLS human factors engineer Rachel Forman, BE-4 controller lead integration and testing engineer Jack Nelson, New Shepard lead avionics software engineer Huong Vo, BE-7 avionics hardware engineer Aaron Wang, 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

Jeff Bezos pops champagne after emerging from the New Shepard capsule after his spaceflight on July 20, 2021.

Blue Origin

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

A mockup of the crew lander vehicle at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in August 2020.

Blue Origin

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

Billionaire businessman Jeff Bezos is launched with three crew members aboard a New Shepard rocket on the world’s first unpiloted suborbital flight from Blue Origin’s Launch Site 1 near Van Horn, Texas, July 20, 2021.

Joe Skipper | Reuters

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.

An artist’s illustration of a New Glenn rocket standing on the launchpad in Florida.

Blue Origin

BE-4 engine test at Blue Origin’s West Texas launch facility.

Blue Origin

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.

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Categories
Health

WHO says Covid origin investigation is being ‘poisoned by politics’

WHO says Covid origin investigation is being 'poisoned by politics'

Executive Director of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) emergencies program Mike Ryan speaks at a news conference on the novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) in Geneva, Switzerland.

Denis Balibouse | Reuters

A top World Health Organization official said Friday that investigations into the origins of Covid-19 are being “poisoned by politics.”

U.S. President Joe Biden announced Wednesday that he’s ordered intelligence agencies to conduct “a report on their most up-to-date analysis of the origins of Covid-19, including whether it emerged from human contact with an infected animal or from a laboratory accident.”

The WHO has come under increasing pressure in recent days from U.S. and European officials to take another look at whether the coronavirus could have escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China, after a previously undisclosed U.S. intelligence report came to light, revealing that three researchers sought hospital care after falling ill with Covid-like symptoms in November 2019.

Dr. Mike Ryan, executive director of WHO’s Health Emergencies Program, asked if countries could separate the politics from the science.

“Putting WHO in a position like it has been put in is very unfair to the science we’re trying to carry out, and it puts us as an organization, frankly, in an impossible position to deliver the answers that the world wants,” Ryan said at a news briefing.

The WHO has been repeatedly accused of allowing the Chinese government to avoid a thorough investigation into the origins of Covid-19, which was first discovered in Wuhan in late 2019. At a Senate hearing earlier this week Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., pressed White House chief medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci on the WHO’s close ties to China.

“Can we agree that if you took (Chinese) President Xi Jinping and turned him upside down and shook him, the World Health Organization would fall out of his pocket?” Fauci responded by saying that he has no way of knowing China’s influence on the agency.

The hypothesis that Covid-19 came from a Wuhan virology lab was initially dismissed as a right-wing conspiracy theory, but it’s been gaining traction in recent weeks.

The majority of the intelligence community believes that it is equally plausible that the virus originated in a lab and in an animal. Federal health officials continue to maintain their position that it is more likely that the virus has zoonotic origins. The CDC’s website still states “we know that it originally came from an animal, likely a bat.”

Categories
Health

Lab origin of Covid ‘one risk,’ animal host is most typical

Lab origin of Covid 'one possibility,' animal host is most common

The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Dr. Rochelle Walensky testified during a Senate Funds Subcommittee hearing to consider fiscal 2022 budget application for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on May 19, 2021 in Washington, DC.

Jim Lo Scalzo | AFP | Getty Images

The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, on Wednesday, did not rule out the possibility that Covid-19 could have come from a laboratory, saying it was “certainly” “a possibility”.

However, most coronaviruses “are generally of animal origin,” Walensky said on the Senate testimony after saying she hadn’t seen enough data to give her opinion on how the current pandemic was created.

The statements by the Biden government’s chief health official came amid growing calls to investigate whether the virus was zoonotic, animal, or from a laboratory in Wuhan, China.

The World Health Organization said in a report in March that it was “extremely unlikely” that the virus was transmitted to humans through an accidental laboratory leak. However, this conclusion has been heavily criticized, and other scientists have since called for further investigation.

“Theories about accidental release from a laboratory and about zoonotic overflows are still viable,” said a letter from 18 scientists published last week in Science. Other scholars have criticized this letter for drawing the wrong equivalence between the likelihood of a laboratory leak and a natural-origin scenario, the New York Times reported.

The CDC website currently states that while the exact source of the outbreak is unknown, “we do know that it originally came from an animal, likely a bat”.

Covid-19 was first discovered in Wuhan in the Chinese province of Hubei.

The emergence of the virus has also become a hotly debated topic in American politics.

At Wednesday’s hearing on the CDC’s budget for the next fiscal year beginning October 1, Senator John Kennedy, R-La., Asked Walensky for her opinion on where the pandemic began.

“I don’t think I’ve seen enough data, individual data, to comment on this,” said Walensky.

When asked about the possibilities, Walensky said, “Certainly the possibilities from which most of the coronaviruses known to us that have infected the population – SARS CoV-1, MERS – are generally of animal origin.”

Kennedy replied, “Are there any other options?”

“Surely a laboratory-based provenance is a possibility,” said Walensky.

Covid-19 turned into a pandemic in March 2020. The virus has now infected more than 164 million people and killed more than 3.4 million people worldwide, according to Johns Hopkins University.

Robert Redfield, the former CDC director who worked on the U.S.’s response to the pandemic under ex-President Donald Trump, said in March he believed the coronavirus came from a Wuhan laboratory.

Categories
Business

Blue Origin Challenges NASA Over SpaceX Moon Lander Deal

Blue Origin Challenges NASA Over SpaceX Moon Lander Deal

Mr Smith said Blue Origin would make bids for a future competition. But he added, “The idea that we will be able to restore competition with something that is currently completely undefined and completely unfunded makes little sense to us.”

When Bill Nelson, a former Florida Senator whom President Biden has appointed as NASA’s next administrator, testified at a confirmation hearing last week, Senator Maria Cantwell, Democrat of Washington and chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, was petitioned him to undertake to present a plan to Congress on how NASA would ensure commercial competition under the lunar lander program.

“I do,” said Mr. Nelson. “The competition is always good.”

Mr Smith said NASA has hired more than one company in the past with programs similar to space station missions, despite a lack of security for future budgets.

The Blue Origin-led offering was more than double that of SpaceX at $ 6.0 billion. But Mr Smith said NASA had returned to SpaceX and negotiated the price of their proposal, despite not having had similar conversations with the other two teams.

“We haven’t had a chance to revise and that’s basically unfair,” said Mr Smith.

Less than $ 9 billion would have paid for two landers, and that’s comparable to the $ 8.3 billion cost of the commercial occupation program that now enables transportation to the space station, the protest argued.

“NASA receives great value from these proposals,” said Smith.

The evaluations of the offers by NASA resulted in evaluations of the technical aspects of the proposals by Blue Origin and SpaceX as “acceptable”. The rating of Dynetics was lower and was “marginal”. SpaceX’s management was rated “excellent” while Blue Origin and its partners, as well as Dynetics, were rated “very good”.

Mr Smith said NASA misjudged aspects of its proposal such as the communications system and redundancy in guidance and navigation as vulnerabilities. He also said it downplayed the risks in SpaceX’s design, such as the need to refuel Starship in orbit, which has never been attempted before.

Categories
Health

W.H.O. consultants investigating the origin of the virus go to a lab in Wuhan.

W.H.O. experts investigating the origin of the virus visit a lab in Wuhan.

A team of experts from the World Health Organization studying the causes of the pandemic visited a research center in Wuhan, China on Wednesday that has been the subject of several unsubstantiated theories about the coronavirus.

WHO scientists met with staff at the center, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which houses a state-of-the-art laboratory known for its research on coronaviruses.

The institute came under scrutiny last year when the Trump administration advocated the unsubstantiated theory that the virus may have leaked from a government-run laboratory in China. But many high-ranking American officials have privately said that evidence suggesting a laboratory accident is primarily circumstantial.

Most scientists agree that the coronavirus most likely occurred in nature and spread from animals to humans. Peter Daszak, one of the experts on the WHO team, described the conversation on Wednesday at the Wuhan Institute as open. “Important questions asked and answered,” he wrote on Twitter, without giving details.

One of the people the WHO team met was Shi Zhengli, known as China’s “bat woman” for her study of coronaviruses found in bats. In June, Dr. Shi first voiced fears that the virus may have leaked from the lab, according to an interview with Scientific American. Later checks showed that none of the gene sequences matched the viruses examined by the staff.

Separately, China announced on Wednesday that it would provide 10 million Covid-19 vaccines to Covax, a global body promoting equitable access to coronavirus vaccinations.

The decision is “another important step China has taken to promote fair distribution of vaccines,” said Wang Wenbin, a foreign ministry spokesman.

He also said the World Health Organization has started reviewing emergency vaccine approval. It was unclear what vaccines Mr. Wang was referring to. Two vaccines – manufactured by Chinese companies Sinovac and Sinopharm – have been approved for use in China.