Posted on 02/13/2025 3:20:33 PM PST by SunkenCiv
The CEO of Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin announced in an all-hands call on Thursday company-wide layoffs of "about 10 percent" of its employees, a sweeping readjustment as it aims to cut costs and ramp up rocket launches.
The layoffs affect roughly 1,400 of the company's nearly 14,000 employees - mostly concentrated in Florida, Texas and Washington - and comes as Blue Origin starts production of its giant New Glenn rocket, which had its first long-awaited debut launch last month...
[CEO Dave] Limp said the decision would help Blue Origin scale New Glenn manufacturing and increase the rocket's launch cadence, two goals crucial to competing with Elon Musk's SpaceX and its dominant Falcon 9.
To do that, the company needs a culture that is "quick, nimble, decisive, and very focused on our customers," said Limp, who was plucked by Bezos from Amazon's customer-focused devices unit in late 2023 to lead Blue Origin.
Limp has been tasked with streamlining Blue Origin's many business units - from space stations to lunar landers for NASA - and pushing for greater focus on New Glenn, giving the company a fresh sense of urgency after years of development paralysis, multiple employees say.
But some employees believe morale and the company's culture has suffered amid Limp's push for speed, two employees said, adding some staff are seeking jobs elsewhere regardless of who survives Thursday's layoffs.
(Excerpt) Read more at reuters.com ...
Stop innovating and crank up production. Just like NASA using the same design for 20 years.
He is getting bored with his hobby Time for pickle ball
Headline is copied correctly; the semi-literate “journalist” fails to understand that ‘layoff’ is a noun, not a verb.
I’ll give Bezos credit for riding his own rocket.
Actually we need BO to stay in the game.
Zero competition is what caused Boeing to turn into such a manure pile.
I wonder how much taxpayer money this lot was getting....
Yeah me too
Looks like Blue Origin got tens of millions of dollars from Florida...
I see BO and thin Barrack Obama
Put Musk and Bezos together and get us to Mars. Eliminate the bloat and create a new NASA.
Not a new nasa
Anything but anything resembling nasa
Astronauts and cosmonauts aboard the ISS, MIR, SKYLAB, all had real issues with how being exposed to the pounding of radiation and weightlessness had and have in the human body.
And then there’s that thing about not going completely insane, the human mind.
Then there’s that thing of the ability of the crew compliment to get along, work together, not rip each other to shreds.
Food and water, medical, mechanical, environment / spacesuits, and all the other supplies and equipment they’re going to need. Which is extensive and you could write a manual, but I’ll not get into all of it.
It’d be sending a crew to their deaths from the get-go, with no possibility of actually getting anywhere near Mars or if so, if the ship is still space worthy upon entering orbit, full of long-dead corpses.
Let’s focus on the Moon, if things are going about making a trip into space.
Bezos low orbit fun ride rocket will never be viable. Its a gimmick.
It would have been a good idea to build more than one of them, so at least the joy rides would be more common.
But the flights are boring to watch, and only for the upper income echelon, with no prospect of becoming cheaper.
B.O. was so focused on fulfilling that gubmint contract for the bigger engine, and so risk-averse when it came to putting some of Bezos’ personal billions into it, that strapping together more of the original engines to make an orbital vehicle never got serious consideration.
Of course, not many expected the spectacular success of the Falcon 9 platform and rapid R&D and pace of testing at SpaceX and thanks to Elon Musk.
I hope some federal judge in Rhode Island doesn’t enjoin him from laying off workers. /sarc
EC
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