Bezos’ Wild Summer Continues

Jeff Bezos has been having a summer of ups and downs, first going to space and now losing some of his top talent at Blue Origin. 

According to a number of media sources, 17 key leaders have made their departure along with two engineers, Nitin Arora and Lauren Lyons. Arora now works for Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Lyons, Firefly Aerospace.

Lyons was a Lead Systems Engineer in the Advanced Development Programs division at Blue Origin, who held roles in the Requirements, Verification, Validation, and Certification team for the Artemis Human Landing System National Team. Before that, she worked as a senior engineer at SpaceX where she worked on Falcon 9, Starlink, Cargo Dragon, and Crew Dragon.

She will now join Firefly as the COO.

Nitin Arora worked as mission architecture and integration lead on Blue Origin’s Human Landing System National Team, before announcing on his LinkedIn page on Monday that he left the company to join the team at SpaceX.

Those who have left did not specify why.

In April, Bezos’ company Blue Origin lost its bid for a NASA development contract for the Human Landing System program, while SpaceX was announced as the awardee.

Blue Origin protested the decision to award SpaceX as the sole winner of the contract and has continued to do so before suing NASA in regards to that decision in federal court last Monday.

Ten days after Bezo’s arrival back to earth on July 20, Blue Origin gave all of its full-time employees a no-strings-attached $10,000 bonus. The company confirmed with CNBC that it was intended as a “thank you” for achieving the milestone of launching people to space. The company has nearly 4,000 employees around the US.

FMI: www.blueorigin.com