A small group of current and former employees of Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin, recently shed light on the company’s commitment to safety for its rockets. An essay signed by some current and former employees of the firm claims that the company has poor safety culture around its rockets.
The issues are so bad that the authors of the essay say they wouldn’t feel safe taking a ride in a Blue Origin rocket if given the chance. “Many of us have spent our careers dreaming of helping to launch a crewed rocket into space and seeing it safely touch back down on Earth,” the employees wrote. “But when Jeff Bezos flew to space this July, we did not share his elation. Instead, many of us watched with an overwhelming sense of unease. Some of us couldn’t bear to watch at all.”
Bad culture and safety hazards
Notably, the writers of the essay did not list any safety issues with the company’s New Shepard rocket that ferried people to the edge of space. However, they described a work culture in which overstretched teams had huge workloads without a reasonable increase in personnel or budget.
That culture, backed by the lack of overarching safety regulation for the fairly new commercial spaceflight industry, forced the staff to prioritize speed over safety, increasing the chances that safety issues flew under the radar.
Blue Origin becoming infamous
“Blue Origin has been lucky that nothing has happened so far,” one anonymous engineer wrote in the essay. “Many of this essay’s authors say they would not fly on a Blue Origin vehicle. And no wonder — we have all seen how often teams are stretched beyond reasonable limits.”
Blue Origin has been in the headlines for a while. In August, the company dragged NASA to court, alleging NASA’s handling of the Human Landing System program was not appropriate. The space agency chose Elon Musk’s SpaceX for a moon lander contract worth $2.9 billion, opting not to fund a $5.9 billion proposal from Jeff Bezos’ company. NASA’s intention was to sign two separate contracts at first, but limited funding from Congress derailed those plans.
