A Closer Look at Jeff Bezos DESTROYED Blue Origin...and got HUMILIATED by SpaceX & Elon Musk

Bezos is best known as Amazon's founder, but he believes his most valuable company is Blue Origin. His space project is only six years behind the online giant, however it isn't on the same level. Blue Origin sees itself as the tortoise in the race against the hare. The hare is so confident about winning, it takes a nap. The tortoise is slow and steady, and ends up victorious. But if SpaceX is the hare in the story, there's a twist, because it's definitely not napping. Bezos quietly founded Blue Origin in 2000. Elon Musk started SpaceX two years later, but the reality is that Jeff Bezos is slower than Elon Musk. Hi, and welcome back to Great SpaceX. You know, I really enjoy reading your comments. It means a lot to us, and it's really helping us grow. Thank you so much. What went wrong? Well, the big delay can be traced to Jeff Bezos' decisions. And in today's episode of Great SpaceX, we're going to give you amazing facts that you might not have known about Bezos' multi-billion dollar company. Don't worry, I'll be gentle. Let's begin the drama of today's episode with Blue Origin's July flight. This flight certainly didn't mark the first time that Blue Origin got major media attention, but the fact that it was a crewed launch, with a crew that included Bezos himself, and its temporal proximity to Virgin Galactic's crewed suborbital launch with its founder Richard Branson just over a week beforehand, shone a brighter light on the company. Ignoring all the wrong attention about flight costs or who benefits, Bezos' behaviors and competitive infographics put out by Blue Origin at that time have prompted criticism of the company. Ahead of Blue Origin's crewed suborbital flight, the company published the first of several infographics that could be labeled competitive in the most polite of terms. This first infographic, which Blue Origin tweeted on July 9th, displayed a side-by-side comparison showing the differences between Virgin Galactic's suborbital ride, dubbed SpaceShipTwo, and Blue Origin's New Shepard. The infographic was posted just two days before Virgin Galactic's crewed suborbital flight on July 11th. Among the many attributes Blue Origin listed in the infographic, it specifically pointed to the fact that Blue Origin's flight would reach above the Kármán line, an internationally recognized boundary of space 62 miles above Earth, while Virgin Galactic's flight would only reach above 50 miles, an altitude that merits astronaut wings by U.S. government agencies. This infographic was followed by additional infographics that have poked at other space companies. For example, the latest one, which the company published on its website, called SpaceX's Starship Deep Space Vehicle Immensely Complex and Heightened Risk. As Eric Berger said, his, referring to Bezos, public relations tactic of employing infographics critical of SpaceX seems ham-fisted and tone-deaf. The infographic depicting SpaceX's Starship points to another major point of contention, sparked by Bezos and his company. In April, NASA named SpaceX the sole winner of its Human Landing System, or HLS, contract. That will see the company build NASA's next moon lander, which will bring astronauts to the lunar surface as part of the agency's Artemis program. SpaceX, which will use Starship for the job, beat out Dynetics and the Blue Origin led national team for the contract. NASA had previously stated that it would like to award more than one HLS contract so the Artemis program could benefit from competition and redundancy, but that wasn't a viable option given the relatively low levels of funding Congress has allocated for the HLS work, agency officials said in the wake of the contract announcement. Instead of accepting NASA's decision, Blue Origin and Dynetics both filed protests with the US Government Accountability Office. This was followed by a series of lawsuits that lasted until last November with the final verdict in favor of NASA. It's unclear how much time, money and effort Bezos and Blue Origin spent on these lawsuits, but the results have remained the same. Notably, amidst all the trouble with the HLS contract, a Blue Origin engineer, Neaton Aurora, who formerly worked for NASA, actually jumped ship to join SpaceX. It's like a slap in the face to Bezos. The reason, perhaps like Berger said, is because Bezos seems to have really strayed from the founding principles of Blue Origin. After all, Bezos has been humiliated by himself again. For now, when young and promising space companies have set significant milestones, officially joining the Orbital Club, Bezos and his company are still hanging around the edge of orbit after two decades of attempts. Bezos himself probably has to take most of the blame due to his lax in judgment. Where's the proof? Well, let's not forget a series of sexual harassment scandals that Blue Origin covered in the headlines last year. Even if the world admits that unpunctuality is Elon Musk's style, what Bezos does is show that this must be his title. Blue Origin has been late to deliver the BE-4 engine to their partner ULA countless times. As a result, ULA also had to delay the launch date, and the Vulcan rocket has never been flown thus far. Especially as Blue Origin nears the critical point of delivering flight-ready BE-4 rocket engines to ULA, John Vilja, the senior vice president of Blue Engines, the engineer in charge of the company's rocket engine program, has decided to leave. In Blue Origin CEO Bob Smith's email to employees, Vilja is said to be leaving Blue to pursue his many interests and hobbies outside of work. Which I honestly doubt. But anyway. New Glenn, a Blue Origin rocket expected to beat SpaceX, is in the same predicament as BE-4. What went wrong? Well, the big delay can be traced to a decision Jeff Bezos made years ago. As part of his overall space strategy, Bezos has been thinking about building a large reusable orbital rocket for a long time. Bezos was even already deep into planning this rocket long before New Shepard took his first flight. The big rocket at the time, which would be known publicly as New Glenn more than half a decade later, was not quite so big as it was envisioned today. Rather than being powered by seven BE-4 engines and towering nearly as tall as NASA's famed Saturn V rocket, Bezos originally envisioned a more modest-sized rocket comparable to the Falcon 9 or ULA's single-stick Delta IV. In some iterations, New Glenn had just three main engines. This would have represented a more incremental step for a launch company that has yet to put out a gram of material into orbit. But instead of offering a waypoint between New Shepard and a massive orbital rocket, Bezos ultimately opted to jump right to the massive 313-foot-tall version. It's like if NASA had gone straight from Alan Shepard to the Saturn V rocket, but then also had to make the Saturn V reusable, one former Blue Origin employee said. Instead of crawl, walk, run, Bezos asked his engineering team to begin sprinting toward the launch pad. The engineering challenges of building such a large rocket are big enough. The company's engineering teams, composed of smart and talented people, are struggling with mighty technical challenges. Obviously, the decision to skip the walk part, let alone the crawl, of the company's development has cost Blue Origin dearly. And it's not just the engineering that's the challenge. Since Blue Origin's chief executive officer Bob Smith arrived in the fall of 2017, some employees have struggled with his leadership style and complain that he has acted too slowly, pushing Blue Origin to become more like a traditional aerospace company than a nimble new space startup. But from Smith's perspective, he's trying to implement a culture transformation, from a hobby shop atmosphere to that of a major aerospace contractor that can go out and win major NASA and Defense Department contracts. And recently, Jarrett Jones himself, Senior Vice President of New Glenn at Blue Origin, also ruled out any chance that New Glenn will launch before the end of the year, a schedule that the company had previously cast doubt on. The runway is closing in 2022. He said the company is in the process of setting a new date for the first launch and discussing that with customers, but said it was premature to announce it. It will not be at the end of this year, he acknowledged. Past wrong decisions aside, Bezos now has a chance to make up for his mistakes when NASA just expressed that they want another moon lander for Artemis astronauts. Notably, this newly announced competition will be open to all American companies, except SpaceX. This means that two finalists for the previous award, Dynetics and Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin, will have a chance to break into the moon landing market previously monopolized by SpaceX. Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin still have a long way to go, but this time, the odds of winning are much higher. Hopefully, fortune will smile upon them. And as a quick note, if you have advertising needs, you can contact us directly via email. Otherwise, as always, this is Kevin with Great SpaceX and my team and I will see you next time.