A little less than a month after the successful debut of its New Glenn rocket, Blue Origin\u2019s workforce will be trimmed by 10 percent.<\/p>\n
The cuts were announced during an all-hands meeting on Thursday morning led by the rocket company\u2019s chief executive, Dave Limp. During the gathering, Limp cited \u201cbusiness strategy\u201d as the rationale for making the cuts to a workforce of more than 10,000 people.<\/p>\n
Blue Origin was founded by Jeff Bezos in 2000, and he continues to provide an estimated $2 billion in funding annually to support its operations.<\/p>\n
In a follow-up email to employees on Thursday morning under the subject \u201cDifficult Org News,\u201d Limp said the decision was the result of the company\u2019s planning for 2025 and need for sustainable growth. Blue\u2019s primary goal for the coming year is to scale up its manufacturing output and launch cadence of the New Glenn rocket. Limp cited the scramble to complete the development of New Glenn and get the rocket into orbit as rationale for the cuts.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe grew and hired incredibly fast in the last few years, and with that growth came more bureaucracy and less focus than we needed,\u201d Limp wrote. \u201cIt also became clear that the makeup of our organization must change to ensure our roles are best aligned with executing these priorities.\u201d<\/p>\n
,<\/p>\n
With the cuts, Blue Origin will seek to trim its management ranks. Of the cuts, Limp said, \u201cThis resulted in eliminating some positions in engineering, R&D, and program\/project management and thinning out our layers of management.\u201d<\/p>\n
He added that these difficult decisions will set Blue Origin on course for success this year and beyond. \u201cThis year alone, we will land on the Moon, deliver a record number of incredible engines, and fly New Glenn and New Shepard on a regular cadence,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n
Even before Thursday\u2019s announcement, Blue Origin had been seeking to control costs. According to sources, the company has had a hiring freeze in place for the last six months. And in January, it let the majority of its contractors go.<\/p>\n
The cuts appear to be an effort by Bezos, who hired Limp a little more than a year ago, to put Blue Origin on a more financially sound footing. Although Bezos could continue to fund Blue Origin indefinitely with the wealth he has acquired from Amazon, he has been pushing programs to become, at worst, revenue-neutral.<\/p>\n
In addition to the New Glenn rocket, Blue Origin is working on developing large uncrewed and crewed lunar landers, a human spacecraft for the rocket, and an Orbital Reef space station. The impacts to these programs were not immediately clear.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A little less than a month after the successful debut of its New Glenn rocket, Blue Origin\u2019s workforce will be trimmed by 10 percent. The cuts were announced during an all-hands meeting on Thursday morning led by the rocket company\u2019s chief executive, Dave Limp. During the gathering, Limp cited \u201cbusiness strategy\u201d as the rationale for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":44461,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[509,21],"class_list":["post-44458","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-blue-origin","tag-space"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44458"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44458"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44458\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44461"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44458"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44458"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44458"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}