CNBC by Michael Sheetz 8/20/2021
Key Points
• Blue Origin has lost more than a dozen key leaders and top engineers this summer, CNBC has learned, with most leaving in the weeks after founder Jeff Bezos’ spaceflight.
• Several of the engineers who left were part of Blue Origin’s astronaut lunar lander program. Earlier this year Blue Origin lost its bid for a valuable NASA development contract.
• Shortly after Bezos’ spaceflight, Blue Origin gave all its full-time employees a $10,000, no-strings-attached cash bonus, multiple people familiar with the situation told CNBC.
Jeff Bezos flew to space late last month, but his company has lost top talent since the billionaire space founder came back to Earth.
More than a dozen key leaders and senior engineers have left Blue Origin this summer, CNBC has learned, with many moving on in the weeks after Bezos’ spaceflight.
Two of the engineers, Nitin Arora and Lauren Lyons, this week announced jobs at other space companies: Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Firefly Aerospace, respectively.
Others quietly updated their LinkedIn pages over the past few weeks.
Each unannounced departure was confirmed to CNBC by people familiar with the matter. Those departures include: New Shepard senior vice president Steve Bennett, chief of mission assurance Jeff Ashby (who retired), New Glenn senior director Bob Ess, New Glenn senior finance manager Bill Scammell, senior manager of production testing Christopher Payne, New Shepard technical project manager Nate Chapman, senior propulsion design engineer Dave Sanderson, senior HLS human factors engineer Rachel Forman, BE-4 lead integration and testing engineer Jack Nelson, New Shepard lead avionics software engineer Huong Vo, BE-7 avionics hardware engineer Aaron Wang, propulsion engineer Rex Gu, and rocket engine development engineer Gerry Hudak.
More:
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/20/jeff-bezos-blue-origin-losing-top-talent-during-nasa-lander-fight.html