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Comment by mikeyouse | Hacker News Reader

The comments are interspersed in random threads, but there's a bunch in last month's about the COO being replaced, one striking example:

https://www.reddit.com/r/BlueOrigin/comments/k5icgf/coo_of_j...

> I work for Blue Origin. blue is not telling the public..

> 1. They built 4 different rockets..none are built the same.

> 2. They never documented the builds. The allowed legacy engineers transfer to New Glenn.

> 3. The rockets are marginal at best. tail 4 just came back from Kent..They had to cut it open to replace helium tanks. the tanks have a life cycle.Instead of replacing with new..they ground on the welds till the cracks went away. ATP test was need to know only.

> 4. Software between tails is different..they cant talk to one another.

> 5. BE3 is a single engine dud..The last flights have all been done with the same engine cracks and all.

> 6. All BE3 engine assembly attempts have produced an Engine

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Woof. Cracks in welds is always a bad sign of poor engineering management and quality control. Getting welders that can consistently produce xray quality welds isn't hard or even expensive. You just need to get good people and treat them well. As for discovering them you can xray all the welds during fab to ensure nothing like that makes it out. Though depending on what surfaces you were joining you can often just grind the weld out and try again, though this is pain in the ass with full penetration welds.

My brother runs a high end fabrication company (the kind you might hire to fabricate a piece of your rocket) and such things would never leave the floor of his shop.

Yeah that was my gut reaction too - especially in a town like Seattle... I'm sure there's one or two shops up there that can competently weld critical components that are designed to fly.

While that's certainly not a stellar take on things, none of those points seem to be indicating that "Blue Origin is not doing well". Those seem like pretty standard occurrences for anyone who's worked on a large iterative engineering team. I remember reading similar stuff about SpaceX back in the Falcon9 1.0 days.

If you're comparing their rocket to Falcon 9 1.0 from 7 - 10 years ago, that is concerning, especially when they were founded 2~ years earlier.

Right and a lot of SpaceX's scrappiness and scrambling was due to funding constraints in the early days - if you're running your rocket program like a broke startup when you get $1B/year from daddy Bezos, something's amiss. But broadly, they've been around for 20 years and haven't put anything into orbit yet, so it's hard to call it a serious program.

I know the goals and scale are different, but Astra's on the cusp of orbit after only 5 years and orders of magnitude less investment. Something at BlueOrigin is seriously broken: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astra_(aerospace)

It feels like Blue Origin is Jeff Bezo’s hobby. A very, very, very expensive hobby.

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