Jeff Bezos Lifts Veil on His Rocket Company, Blue Origin
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
https://www.blueorigin.com/careers
Needless to say, there are tons of interesting problems to solve and opportunities to make a huge impact.
I'm not saying you should be willing to die for your work. But historically someone always seems to be. Not least of all in the space business.
Sorry but this comment and some child comments are truly shocking for me in their historical ignorance.
Reality of an engineering employee even for such a company is, success means bringing tiny increase ineffectiveness, weight reduction etc. into super complex system. No truly world changing discoveries. If you are alone, do whatever you want with your life. But once you go for family, working 70-hour weeks is plain stupid, selfish or just extremely bad deal. No work is worth making decisions that you will regret for the rest of your life.
I've had many different kinds of managers. I've had the type that encouraged me to slow down and think carefully about what I'm doing at every step, and I've had the kind that keeps a watchful eye and is always asking "Why isn't this done yet?" Under the latter I started grinding my teeth at night and started engineering things in a fairly brittle way... but my rote productivity was higher than it had ever been. Managerial styles are all engineering decisions just as any other are.
There must be a lot of stuff that you need which is not really limited by US law and that people could work on from their home countries. Examples just in software engineering: Cloud infrastructure, user interfaces, communication platforms, open source projects that are 90% of where you needed them to be to use them, BSP layers for embedded systems you want to use.
If only it was that simple - in a former job I designed systems for a non-US multinational that did ITAR work and it was incredibly painful to work out the rules for who could or could not see particular items of data.
>Applicants must be a United States citizen ... >We hold all information confidential and are an equal opportunity employer.
[1]Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as amended, protects applicants and employees from discrimination in hiring, promotion, discharge, pay, fringe benefits, job training, classification, referral, and other aspects of employment, on the basis of race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy), or national origin.
[1]http://www1.eeoc.gov/employers/upload/eeoc_self_print_poster...
"Employers should not ask whether or not a job applicant is a United States citizen before making an offer of employment... the law prohibits employers from hiring only U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents unless required to do so by law, regulation or government contract" [1]
However, from the job listings, it sounds like that all employees would have access to regulated information, thus exempting them from the prohibition:
"...U.S. citizen, permanent resident alien or otherwise able to review all export-controlled technical information."
[1] http://www.eeoc.gov/laws/practices/inquiries_citizenship.cfm
The Chinese do silly things like blow up satellites (causing space debris), to show their might - things that the US had done 30 years ago.
Whereas, the US has systems that can track and predict all space debris of sizes greater than 1/2 inch.
It's just orders of magnitude more advanced.
http://www.defensemedianetwork.com/stories/u-s-navy-missile-...
On the other hand the argument was about China's technical abilities and intercepting something in a higher orbit with a faster closing velocity is harder to do than the US's anti-satellite test. The Chinese proved they could destroy surveillance satellites and the US didn't really show that they could do the same.
That said, with so many viable missile platforms, why would Blue Origin be used for that?
I know very little about the vertical. As a matter of principle, I typically avoid gigs that involve government funding. However, this one is more interesting than most.
What do you mean?
The only company I've worked for for any length of time that was funded in part by government funds was WNYC, which was a blast!
Public Radio to me is one of those times where the broken clock happens to show the right time of day. Sure, it's government funding, but the content we created was really stellar.
I mean, on some higher political level, there's always the "you use the roads" argument, but I'm talking about having to report to someone in the government about how their funding is being used. That's what I object to.
But if you're worried about launching military communication satellites, well, they probably will be at some point.
[1] Not my view of what's worthwhile of course.
It is the world's nature.
Hopefully, not a literal impact :)
I considered applying a few months ago but my current employer (large conglom-o-corp that ate my old company) has made me nervous about being walled-off as a code-monkey.
Is there a path to from my current position to something more systems related? Has anyone made this transition before?
Are you serious? People come to be systems programmers with no programming experience, obviously with some web/server experience will be even more suited to learn it.
Having a realistic, incremental long-term plan may be not enough to remain relevant in the market, if the latter shifts fast enough. Would you say Lockheed and Boeing don't have have a realistic plan? Yet their lunch is increasingly eaten by competition. It's good they actually adapt their plans.
You're forgetting that there isn't actually a market here. There is currently no commercial service that brings you into space.
But on the other hand, I'd be surprised if Blue Origin was only focused on the market of commercial flights to space. That market is somewhat covered by Russia's Soyuz flights - admittedly just a few flights total so far. Suborbital flights - may be, but there could be competition from Virgin Galactic. Blue Origin also makes engines which are planned to be used on other manufacturer's rockets - here we have competition from Aerojet and even XCOR. So - even if some market niches don't exist today, it doesn't mean Blue Origin doesn't have competition - as they are also not offering flight right now. Competition in space flight, for example, existed, say, in 1960, when two countries tried to send a man to space first.
They are much closer to the hypothetical market of suborbital joyrides than CopSub, but so far, that hypothetical market does not sustain anything.
But seriously...what did you really mean to say? I hate that phrase with a passion.
What now? I was under the assumption that the solar energy levels hitting the earth were quite higher/more than we could ever "need" and also that energy usage isn't going to increase at a consistent rate. Anyone have data on this? Does his timeframe (few centuries) exceed than existing reporting? Does it even make sense to project a 2-3% increase in energy consumption over ~300 years?
Found: http://illumin.usc.edu/assets/submissions/675/murphy_CSP.pdf
Population growth should start stabilizing near 10 billion around 2050... but if a billion of those people are taking exotic vacations every month in their electric jets and living in nanorobot houses that reconfigure themselves every week based on the trends on Pinterest then yes... we will bump up against terrestrial photon limits.
Do we need to use that energy? No. If we move the other direction, towards efficiency-focused technologies that allow us to live embedded in native-ish ecologies then 10 billion people can live with a tiny fraction of Earth's solar energy.
Which scenario will we be in? I think it's impossible to know. Right now we're still piecing together how that second scenario works. What is a minimal human-supporting ecology? How do you organize goods and services to maintain it? Wealthy people who want to maintain power will push us as hard as possible to keep production and consumption as high as possible because that's where their power is derived. Networks and artificial intelligence will try to show people how to live efficiently, maximizing happiness with a minimum of resources in loose federations.
Which of these two forces will control human hearts post-2050? I have no idea.
And if we ever get there, it will be one of those nice problems to have.
This is kind of true, except cheap energy is fungible with smarter energy use. So you could argue that everything is hindered by the lack of good design (and by extension design instruction in schools).
I would be interested to know what you're thinking about when you say "pretty much everything". For reference, the things I care a lot about limited job mobility, people getting murdered, abuse, including rape and incarceration, forced migration, and addiction and I don't see how any of that is the result of expensive or dirty energy.
> Currently, most rocket companies launch, at most, about a dozen times a year. “You never get really great at something you do 10, 12 times a year,” Mr. Bezos said. With a small fleet of reusable New Shepard rockets, Blue Origin could be launching dozens of times a year.
So they'd be doing the same as everyone else?
> plural dozens or dozen 1 : a group of 12 2 : an indefinitely large number <dozens of times>
Jeff really likes things that fly. Drones, Cargo planes and rockets!
You could also get a Tesla and enter the contest:
http://www.teslarati.com/tesla-referral-program-ludicrous-mo...
Bezos founded it in 2000.
common health technologies freeze me now and wake me up in 400 years please.
Not undeservingly Carmack is something of a folk hero here (for example: http://h14s.p5r.org/2012/09/0x5f3759df.html) but I don't think being a 10X programmer necessarily translates into great rocket company CEO and in terms of entrepreneurial and organizational skill Bezos excels (at least based on Amazon's success).
edit: however ... I've just read that article and it is actually the most in-depth and interesting analysis I've read on the subject so thanks!
The two companies were founded in 2000. You're right about the capital, tough: as of 2014, Bezos had already invested half a billion dollars into Blue Origin.
Bezo's has more money to invest in failures and iteration than Carmack did. Also as far as intelligence goes I think they're pretty close, or Bezos would come out ahead, specifically when taking account of deep breadth of knowledge.
And motivation. Carmack's original thing was just that he was spending a lot of money on modifying Ferarris, and instead decided to put that money towards rocket development. That's not to say they took things more seriously later on, but that was the start of it.
And we learned very, very well, that H2O2 monopropellants rocket engines are a pain to use in practice, and don't seem feasible for any kind of reusable system.
In no way Armadillo Aerospace's work shown that H2O2 engines are somehow fundamentally inferior to other rocket engines. What turned AA away from H2O2 were problems to obtain rocket-grade without building a processing plant.
But I also remember lots of pictures of broken or melted catalyst on the blog. Perhaps my recollection is faulty.
You feel he could have done a better job - they both tried, Blue Origin has lasted longer and achieved more. Reality says he couldn't and didn't do a better job, so your model is inaccurate somewhere.
A quick Google suggests Carmack's net worth is ~40 million, and Bezos' ~49 billion, with over 500 million invested in Blue Origin - and experience running a successful big company. That doesn't sound like dim prospects for Bezos, does it?
This the problem with hero worship, it blinds you to the faults of your hero to the point where you're attacking others because your guy couldn't do it.