An internal company memo at Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin, originally sent in 2018, reveals that the company hired a management consultant from Avascent to evaluate SpaceX’s strengths and weaknesses in order to hopefully follow suit, according to details seen by ArsTechnica.
The internal memo is dated November 1, 2018, and offers a blunt picture of Blue Origin’s inability to keep up with SpaceX, even calling Blue Origin “kind of lazy compared to SpaceX.”
While SpaceX had reached a record-breaking 21 rockets launched in 2018, Blue Origin had yet to even launched a single orbital rocket, nor had it figured out plans to do so.
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Among other things, the consultants found that SpaceX had a customer focus, unlike Blue Origin, saying that the company needs to adjust its culture to fit that model.
“Blue is kind of lazy compared to SpaceX,” said one Blue Origin executive in the memo.
The consultants also pointed out that cost as a design constraint had been embraced by SpaceX, rather than Blue Origin’s tendency to treat it like “an evil metric that leads to a sub-optimal outcome.” A number of other complaints were pointed out by the consultants, as well as by employees themselves amidst the report.
In addition, a fellow Blue Origin employee also said that “Blue is riddled with poor estimating,” leading to poor market price models and subsequently to losing more money on part material purchases.
The memo also surfaced amidst multiple lawsuits and complaints aired by Blue Origin, with Jeff Bezos’s appeal to a $2.9 billion USD NASA lunar contract that went to SpaceX most recently being rejected.
