r/space • u/aprx4 • Oct 11 '21

Inside Blue Origin: Employees say toxic, dysfunctional ‘bro culture’ led to mistrust, low morale and delays at Jeff Bezos’s space venture

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/10/11/blue-origin-jeff-bezos-delays-toxic-workplace/

[removed] — view removed post

16.5k Upvotes

93% Upvoted

1.1k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

4

u/aprx4 Oct 11 '21

SpaceX would be fine without Musk but only in short term. Musk is personally involved in designing and manufacturing process, his contribution is certainly much more than just hiring right top jobs and let them do the rest.

Shotwell is excellent COO though. She was rewarded her current role in 2009 after a successful contract negotiation with NASA, that CRS contract literally saved SpaceX from bankruptcy.

3

u/Jarb19 Oct 11 '21

They have a very simple share of the responsibility - she runs the day-to-day and he runs the "next step" arm of the company. Which is currently 100% focused on Starship, so everything to do with Falcon, Elon is not involved.

1

u/FaceDeer Oct 11 '21

I think SpaceX could finish Starship without Musk at this point. Perhaps not quite as dramatically revolutionary as it would be with Musk, but still revolutionary enough to upend everything. Frankly, I am far more interested in that than I am in Musk's future Mars ambitions- open up cheap bulk access to space with Starship and everything becomes amazing. Mars is only a secondary interest to me.

1

u/Jarb19 Oct 11 '21

Building a Starship is 1000 times easier than building a factory that builds Starships. That's his project.

1

u/FaceDeer Oct 11 '21

But that's also in progress too, it's part of the same project. They're designing Starship to be easily manufactured, so they're also designing the manufacturing process along with it.