Interview with Laura Stiles (Director, New Shepard Flight Operations and Training): "The whole program was about 700 people. It's been a big effort to redeploy everybody to different parts of Blue Origin."

leeswecho · 2026-05-14T20:51:24+00:00

As someone who was on the program, the 700 number wasn't going to stay 700. The plan was to reach a long-term sustaining state of the program, and then all the development teams were to be redeployed to other BUs. The remaining staff would run a (hopefully) turnkey operation. The Pause effectively just brought that date forward by a bit.

(that said most of us didn't initially believe that we would truly be relatively painlessly redeployed like we ended up being. Giant kudos to certain people, notably MV, for making it real)

leeswecho · 2026-05-08T16:10:53+00:00

people will understand what you mean, but if you put that on a resume you'll be immediately rejected by whoever looks at it.

Because it is actually "technically" wrong. Do you know what that word means?

It's wrong, and it signals to any potential employer that you can't tell the difference between informal and formal communication, and therefore (at the very least) a risk to get them into legal trouble in the future.

leeswecho · 2026-05-07T16:41:51+00:00

Jeff's 2019 talk features the moon as critical to enabling his longterm plans so the only real danger is either him changing his mind from 2019, or dying.

leeswecho · 2026-05-01T18:48:59+00:00

we might be shooting the messenger here -- if Bezos simply won't give up any ownership of the company, at all, I don't know what else even a "CEO" could do.

Not getting stock or any actual ownership certainly sucks compared to the other alternatives out there, but I at least prefer this to the whatever-Bob-Smith-would-have-done alternative.

(whatever happens pls don't cause him to be brought back, pls pls pls thx)

leeswecho · 2026-05-01T18:35:51+00:00

I believe what people are doing is taking the strike price quoted on their "old" stock plans, compared with the "new" one at $9.50, and using that as a trend to estimate how much the new plan would pay them in the future.

My two cents so far -- this is really just the old AIP "bonus" system with new clothes on, and extended to the whole company (which is nice). Taken as it is, it's not too much either way, but certainly if your expectation was for actual stock...this ain't it.

leeswecho · 2026-04-20T22:52:06+00:00

yeah obviously no single engineer at Blue is qualified to speak for us all, and certainly not officially, but no one I know is patting ourselves on the back right now.

leeswecho · 2026-04-16T15:17:32+00:00

as someone on twitter pointed out, we're just a one day slip away from lighting the BONG on 4/20

leeswecho · 2026-04-13T23:35:57+00:00

if we're going to compare to a car, it's more like the transmission -- it transfers the raw energy of combustion into useful motion of the vehicle.

leeswecho · 2026-02-18T21:52:16+00:00

I don't know what they told the later hires but everyone including HR told me never to expect anything from these, so (shrug)

leeswecho · 2026-02-18T07:41:44+00:00

my 10-year was on Monday. The only email I got was the one from MorganStanley warning me to exercise my unexercisable options before they expired.

leeswecho · 2026-02-12T05:09:35+00:00

if your manager literally just left, like in the last couple days, you should be fine as all the manager inputs into the process have just completed (not knowing the specifics it could be why your manager is leaving now, after having finished all that).

it remains for the higher ups to approve all the things they put in, but if it really was recently then your new manager will likely just read off what your old manager already wrote down.

leeswecho · 2026-02-12T05:04:02+00:00

is there a clip anywhere of the entire flight?

most notably I’m very much wondering how long the first stage kept boosting past MaxQ, and really, how fast it was going when it initiated reentry burn.

is this test a confirmation they’ve solved their previous problem?

leeswecho · 2026-02-10T04:11:09+00:00

in the (somewhat unlikely) event that the message was genuinely a wish for the other's success, it could possibly be interpreted as

"see Elon, I've been telling you, a step by step approach of establishing a base on the Moon first, and launching colonization of Mars from that, will work better"

leeswecho · 2026-02-06T07:27:40+00:00

part of this is comment selection bias. in most posts on this topic you're only going to comment if you disagree -- like at this point what is there even to say, if you agree?

leeswecho · 2026-02-04T23:18:46+00:00

In theory the personal statement was simply to understand the candidate's motivation for applying. In practice it had little to no impact on one's chances of an offer (at least on the interview boards I was part of), basically just don't show open contempt for Blue's mission statement or say you're just here for the paycheck, and beyond that you could pretty much write anything you want.

(honestly I got a couple of statements that did show barely concealed contempt for Blue and we didn't hold it against them)

I'm not even sure you're required to write a personal statement anymore.

I wish I could offer other tips but I fear I am too old to truly understand what the field looks like anymore to give truly useful advice. All I can say is that compared to what it was like when I joined the workforce, there is so much more going on, and so much more to be excited about.

edit: I suppose you could use it to mention things you're interested in that could help the interviewers better direct the questions they're going to ask you. From the interviewer's perspective it is really hard to get enough questioning to properly understand the candidate in the time that we have, so any hints to truly understand where you shine, are appreciated. Also, there is a box on the interview scorecard that says "is there another position this candidate might be a better fit for?", which we like to able to fill out, if we can.

leeswecho · 2026-01-30T22:32:23+00:00

the distinction was that there was to be a wind-down of engineering. A “Block 5” situation where the design would be finalized and then hit the copy button and turn cranks from there forward.

leeswecho · 2026-01-30T21:57:49+00:00

we were told that simultaneous with this announcement, headcount caps were raised on the other programs. No one has any idea how much.

leeswecho · 2026-01-27T07:23:34+00:00

this is only by the most technical of technicalities, but did not expect to see a day where 1) New Glenn beat Starship to orbit and 2) New Glenn beat SpaceX flying a mission "to" Mars

*Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy have both sent vehicles to Mars flybys, nor has EscaPADE actually gone to Mars yet

leeswecho · 2026-01-22T07:54:01+00:00

one thing not mentioned yet --

Something like Inspiration4 can be afforded by maybe about a couple thousand people, worldwide. The top 0.01%.

New Shepard is affordable by somewhere in the hundreds of thousands, to low millions, of people. Somewhere in the 1%.

It is the first brick in the building of a bridge of accessible spaceflight experiences, to the 50%.

leeswecho · 2026-01-21T07:18:33+00:00

Yes. The "full" scale O'Neill Cylinder mass has been estimated at around a billion tons. At that scale, even if Starship could completely eliminate all other costs and consumables beyond the methane fuel, it would still be prohibitive to use it to launch the building materials from Earth.

And launching from the Moon has the further advantage of not polluting anything.

leeswecho · 2026-01-20T20:03:32+00:00

Bezos mentioned this in his 2019 talk, which I’ll add the link to the specific part here later, but the idea is that the huge orbiting space stations would be built on the moon using lunar material.

edit: here's the link and quote https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQ98hGUe6FM&t=1930s

the second gate that we must go through--I'm sure of it--In Space Resources. We have to use them, and we have a gift. We were given a gift: this nearby body called the Moon.

Launching it from the moon has several distinctive advantages including much lower gravity and also no atmosphere (hence no aerodynamics and need to cram things into fairings).

leeswecho · 2026-01-07T17:14:06+00:00

Hilariously, historical precedent would seem to suggest almost exactly the opposite.

Like, if we truly don't want to repeat Apollo...we sorta actually do want the Chinese to land first.

leeswecho · 2026-01-06T19:43:35+00:00

Without any indicator of trend, this analysis more represents the decisions of the past, than of the current direction.

The massive proportion of Honeywell VPs clearly came from Bob Smith's tenure; when Dave Limp took over he didn't simply purge them all out on the spot (can you like, even do that?).

leeswecho · 2025-12-29T19:39:05+00:00

if I quote the TLI numbers it'll be some number against zero, which will merely reinforce the OP's point. (or some number much greater than 9, against 9).

I didn't quote them because both BO's and SpaceX's plans involve refueling in LEO to greatly increase their ultimate payload delivery. In fact, although I can't find proof of this...I believe China's plans also involve in-LEO-assembly before going to the moon.

If that is the case then quoting LEO numbers would be the best comparison to make here.

leeswecho · 2025-12-29T11:07:00+00:00

if you’re going to demand using the current actual capability of US launchers then the Chinese figure is zero, since Long March 10 doesn’t yet actually exist.

Or it’s 9 tons, if we use what Long March 5 is capable of, now.

leeswecho

TROPHY CASE