Company Blue Origin, founded by Jeff Bezos, has announced the mass release. According to media reports, close 1 000 employees will lose their jobs.
Reasons for cuts
General director Blue Origin Dave Limp announced the layoff in an internal letter, which received CNN and The New York Times.
According to estimates The New York Times, The company has close 10 000 workers, And therefore, reduction will cover approx 10% staff. The main reason is the excessively fast growth of the company in recent years, which led to increased bureaucracy and loss of focus. The company decided to review the organizational structure, to implement their priorities more effectively.
Who will be affected by the layoffs??
According to The New York Times, reductions will cover the following areas:
- Engineering
- Research and development
- Project management
- Management
What's happening now at Blue Origin?
Blue Origin was founded by Jeff Bezos in 2000 year, two years earlier than Elon Musk's SpaceX. Both companies aim to expand humanity's presence in space, however, their approaches differ:
- Blue Origin bets on creation of large space stations.
- SpaceX focuses on colonization of Mars.
Despite the reduction, the company continues to work on several important projects:
- The New Shepard rocket carried out 29 launches, of which 9 — with the crew. The last flight took place 4 February 2024 year.
- New Glenn — partially reusable rocket, which was successfully launched for the first time last month. During the test flight, the upper stage of the rocket reached orbit, but the first stage failed to land successfully on the floating platform.
- Blue Origin also working on the Blue Moon lunar lander, which NASA chose as the second manned lunar rover for the program Artemis.