“When discussing Blue Origin, it’s almost impossible not to compare the company to SpaceX, which also has a prominent billionaire founder, Elon Musk. Bezos’ comments about being decisive are striking because that is one of the secrets to SpaceX’s success.”
This is ridiculous. We should be methodical about space. These capitalists racing each other in a literal dick shaped rocket measuring contest are going to race their way into the first moon colony transport killing everyone on board, not that they care.
The publically funded NASA model is better in every way… If we had bothered to fund it. Had to cut these rich fuck’s taxes though, amirite?
I’m pretty sure what we’re all thinking is “pay your taxes and take better care of your employees.”
Billionaires really do live in fantasy land.
“We’re going to become the world’s most decisive company across any industry,” he said. “We’re going to get really good at taking appropriate technology risks, making those decisions quickly.”
This quote is business-speak — the opposite of what is needed.
Talk is cheap. Bezos created a giant soulless enterprise bureaucracy at Amazon. I don’t see how that experience translates to success in a fast-moving engineering-focused industry.
It seems like Blue has made so little progress toward their stated goal of “millions of people living and working in space”, and it’s weird to me how little he seems to focus on that anymore. Show a timeline with New Glenn flying [Blue Crew?] to Orbital Reef, then more Reefs and a moon base, then orbital rings, then…
It’ll take some work to undo Bob Smith’s bureaucracy and speed up their development, contracting, and “decision making”.
Who the fuck is thinking that
It’s not about faster, it’s about the approach. They were out there pushing National Team landers, Orbital Reef, giant multistage orbital rockets, brand new engines for ULA rockets. And all they’d managed to do was build a small sub-orbital rocket and capsule. There’s no iteration from that, no building the company structures, setting pathways for development and testing. Those allow you to plan the commercial offerings with confidence (Praise Shotwell) and created space to think about those more ambitious projects.
SpaceX succeeded because Kestrel and Falcon 1 was the focus, and eventually that worked. Other possible follow-ons like Falcon 5 and Air were scrapped. What they learned as an organisation allowed them to move on to Merlin, Falcon 9 and Dragon. That capacity may be there at BO, but there’s no substitute to experience.This is the best summary I could come up with:
“Blue Origin needs to be much faster, and it’s one of the reasons that I left my role as the CEO of Amazon a couple of years ago,” he said.
When discussing Blue Origin, it’s almost impossible not to compare the company to SpaceX, which also has a prominent billionaire founder, Elon Musk.
Bezos recently got rid of Bob Smith, who had served as Blue Origin’s CEO for half a decade.
This echoes comments Ars reported on from another Blue Origin official, Lars Hoffman, earlier this week.
Bezos said a lot of the company’s focus has been not just on getting the first New Glenn rocket ready at Blue Origin’s factory in Florida but on building up the capacity to fly two dozen a year.
In his remarks, Bezos did not reference the company’s experiments with an experimental reusable upper stage called Project Jarvis.
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