Jeff Bezos is losing the billionaire space race

The Amazon founder’s firm has galaxies of cash but is plagued by safety concerns and a toxic workplace culture

The billionaire space race is only a race by name. In reality, there is SpaceX – and everyone else. Only the company founded by Elon Musk nearly two decades ago has sent an orbital rocket booster into space and landed it safely again. Only SpaceX has landed a rocket the size of a 15-storey building on a drone ship in the middle of the ocean. Only SpaceX has carried both Nasa astronauts and private citizens to the International Space Station. Only SpaceX is producing thousands of its own table-sized communication satellites every year. Only SpaceX has the almost weekly launch cadence necessary to single-handedly double the number of operational satellites in orbit in less than two years. Only SpaceX is launching prototypes of the largest and most powerful rocket ever made, a behemoth called Starship that is destined to carry humans to the moon.

SpaceX’s total dominance of the rocket industry is not what you would expect. There is more innovation happening in the commercial space sector today than at any time in history, and the launch services sector is particularly competitive. Relativity Space is building the world’s first 3D-printed rocket and plans to build rockets on Mars with robots. Virgin Orbit is putting satellites into orbit by launching a rocket from beneath the wing of a jumbo jet. Its sister company, Virgin Galactic, is flying people to the edge of space from an air-launched space plane. RocketLab has developed the first rocket engine fed with an electric pump and is trying to catch it out of the air with a net connected to a helicopter.

And then there’s Blue Origin, which dominated world headlines for days last week with its launch of the Star Trek actor William Shatner – briefly – into space.

If there were any rocket company expected to be at a comparable level of technological achievement to SpaceX, it is Blue Origin. The company was founded by the former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos in 2000, two years before SpaceX set up shop in California. In 2015, Blue Origin became the first company to send a rocket above the Kármán Line, the internationally recognised boundary of space, and land it again. While this is not as challenging as bringing a rocket back from orbit – as Musk has taunted Bezos in the past – it was still a milestone in the history of private space exploration.

Bezos founded Blue Origin with visionary goals. The question is: why can’t the second richest man in the world achieve them?

Over the past few years, Blue Origin’s master plan has begun unravelling. Earlier this year, Nasa awarded its lunar lander contract to SpaceX, leaving Blue Origin in the lurch. It’s now suing the US government to reconsider the award. It’s seen an exodus of top engineering talent following the lost contract, which has only exacerbated its already considerable delays. Blue Origin has struggled to hit its stride producing its powerful BE-4 rocket engine and as a result the maiden launch of ULA’s Vulcan rocket has slipped to late 2022. This will make the first flight of the engine a full five years behind schedule.

Meanwhile, the first flight of the company’s fabled New Glenn rocket, a heavy launch vehicle capable of hoisting 45,000kg into low Earth orbit, has also been pushed to late 2022 at the earliest. It was originally meant to fly for the first time last year. Bezos didn’t even get the glory of being the first billionaire to ride his own rocket into space. Just two weeks before he flew to the edge of space this summer, Richard Branson completed a suborbital flight in his own spaceplane with Virgin Galactic.

How did this happen? Blue Origin employs thousands of the world’s top rocket engineers. The company also has access to a virtually unlimited supply of money. Bezos, who is worth just south of $200bn, spends $1bn a year out of his own pocket to fund Blue Origin. By all measures, it should be one of the most successful space companies in the world.

“Blue Origin has all the ingredients for success and to become something truly fantastic,” said Ally Abrams, the former head of Blue Origin employee communications who recently wrote a whistleblower essay detailing safety concerns and rampant sexism at the company. “The engineers really believed that and they try every day to make that a reality despite the leadership’s interventions.”

According to Abrams, Blue Origin’s troubles have both a technical and cultural dimension. Abrams said the company suffers from an immense amount of technical debt–engineering challenges that build up as a result of choosing a quick solution rather than the best solution – and a relentless focus on speed that undermined its ability to properly address problems with its launch vehicles. She explained the exodus of top talent from Blue Origin as engineers who “got tired of putting Band-Aids on problems”.

Abrams partially attributes the mounting technical debt to Blue Origin’s increasing focus on speed. She traces the mounting pressure to move fast to 2017, when it was clear the company was failing to keep pace with its rivals at SpaceX. She said Bezos’s growing impatience with the pace of development was palpable, as was the “jealousy he seemed to have for the other billionaires who seemed to be making more progress than him”.

But Blue Origin was racked by more than just engineering difficulties.

In her essay, Abrams described a company where executives show “consistently inappropriate” behaviour toward women and where “dissent is actively stifled”. According to her, the cultural problems started at the top and flowed down throughout the company. She said the CEO, Bob Smith, who was tapped by Bezos to lead the company in 2017, repeatedly failed to listen to his employees’ concerns about the safety of the company’s vehicles and its toxic workplace culture.

“Bob Smith is one of the most incapable leaders I have ever encountered,” Abrams said. “Passion withers in his presence. Plenty of engineers didn’t feel comfortable raising safety and quality concerns for fear of retaliation, which is a very scary thing when you’re working on a high-risk, experimental vehicle.”

Abrams’ whistleblower essay was co-signed by 20 anonymous current and former Blue Origin employees. Many of its allegations were denied by the company. A statement from Blue Origin said the company had dismissed Abrams for “repeated warnings for issues involving federal export control regulations”, that the company has no tolerance for harassment or discrimination, and that it believes its New Shepard rocket is “the safest space vehicle ever designed or built”.

“It is particularly difficult and painful, for me, to hear claims being levied that attempt to characterise our entire team in a way that doesn’t align with the character and capability that I see at Blue Origin every day,” Smith wrote in an internal email to Blue Origin employees earlier this month.

Still, Blue Origin employees continue to speak out. Last week, an investigation by the Washington Post echoed the issues raised by Abrams and painted a picture of an organisation riddled with distrust of its leadership, sexism and insufficient concern for the safety of its launch vehicles.

The question for Blue Origin is whether it can overhaul its culture to deliver on its mission. Earlier this year, Bezos stepped down from his role as the CEO of Amazon and committed himself to spending more time focused on Blue Origin. Whether he can reinvigorate the company’s culture with his grand vision for human space exploration and a sense of common purpose remains to be seen.

‘Plenty of engineers didn’t feel OK raising safety and quality concerns for fear of retaliation’

Ally Abrams