Open letter by Blue Origin employees on safety and culture issues
lioness.co
lioness.co
> This suppression of dissent brings us to the matter of safety, which for many of us is the driving force for coming forward with this essay. At Blue Origin, a common question during high-level meetings was, “When will Elon or Branson fly?” Competing with other billionaires—and “making progress for Jeff”—seemed to take precedence over safety concerns that would have slowed down the schedule.
> In 2020, company leaders demonstrated increasing impatience with New Shepard’s schedule of a few flights per year; their goal, routinely communicated to operations and maintenance staff, was to scale to more than 40. Some of us felt that with the resources and staff available, leadership’s race to launch at such a breakneck speed was seriously compromising flight safety. When Challenger exploded, the government’s investigation determined that the push to keep to a schedule of 24 flights per year “directly contributed to unsafe launch operations.” Of note: the Challenger report also cited internal stifling of differences of opinion as one of the organizational issues that led to the disaster and loss of life.
Every organization/ecosystem that has wrestled with safety culture - whether it's NASA, or commercial air travel, or whatever - has reached as basically the primary conclusion that if the broader culture has a "Do what I say, because I'm in charge" norm, and you don't take very active steps to counteract that culture and prevent it, you will get into trouble. You can see plenty of stories of senior pilots making a mistake and not being called out on it by the others in the cockpit; you can also see those stories continue when the pilots were from some particular culture where outside of a cockpit it's socially unacceptable to question your superiors. That isn't the social/cultural issue expressed in this document, but there are other ones with the same effect. At the average company, they'd make for a bad place to work; at a company that's blasting people many miles into the air, they can kill.
And the second is like it: when nontechnical management starts overriding the safety concerns of engineering, you are also in trouble (cf. the NASA/Thiokol conference call that approved the Challenger launch).
If you want to "be careful with Jeff's money" as the article says employees are told to do, you can certainly do that. Launch less. Build slower.
But of course maybe it’s an unfair comparison.
On the other hand, we can very easily make a comparison to “When will Elon or Branson fly?”. If Musk was that obsessed with showing up other billionaires, he could have spent lots of time in orbit, long ago, on a whim. The simple fact he hasn't, shows that he is more focused on getting things done than engaging in self-serving joyrides.
The big difference is "Fear vs. Safety" At SpaceX if you identify a problem you are not afraid to let someone know, because everyone is working together to make the mission a success.
At BO if you identify a problem you will be afraid to let someone know because they may blame you for the problem or criticize your risk tolerance.
https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/senior-diversity-equity-a...
Senior Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Specialist BLUE ORIGIN Washington, DC 22 hours ago
We are a diverse team of collaborators, doers, and problem-solvers who are relentlessly committed to a culture of safety. The Senior Specialist in Diversity, Equity and Inclusion will directly impact the history of space exploration and will require your commitment and detailed attention towards safe and repeatable space flight. Join us in lowering the cost of access to space and enabling Blue Origin’s vision of millions of people living and working in space to benefit Earth.
There are lots of valid points in the article, but Elon talked about the importance of execution speed and cost over fixing all problems with unknown real world impact. The mistake is putting humans in a machine too early, which both Blue Origin and Virgin did.