Well-known journalist Brad Stone has published the book “Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of the Global Empire” about the founder of Amazon and Blue Origin Jeff Bezos. Among other things, it reveals some of the secrets of the American aerospace company Blue Origin – its competition with SpaceX has not always been ethically flawless.

Since then, as the head and founder of Amazon Jeff Bezos created Blue Origin, the company has not yet managed to achieve success comparable to the achievements of its main competitor – SpaceX founded by Elon Musk.

As the journalist pointed out in his investigative book, following the successes of SpaceX in 2016, the founder of Blue Origin began looking for an effective CEO for his company. According to Stone, citing an anonymous source, in an attempt to find an effective manager, the headhunters contacted SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell, offering her a high position at Blue Origin. She quickly refused, saying that “it will not look right.”

It is believed that the search for a CEO followed a series of meetings between Blue Origin top managers and Jeff Bezos, trying to draw the businessman’s attention to the company’s shortcomings. During informal meetings, they complained about “poor internal communication, time-consuming meetings and inconceivably costly decisions“. According to the journalist, one of the engineers directly described the company as a “Potemkin village”.

At that time, the Blue Origin project to send space tourists aboard the New Shepard was postponed many times, and tests often ended in explosions. At the same time, SpaceX, under the leadership of Shotwell, has repeatedly achieved further successes, including the conclusion of prestigious contracts. In particular, the company was selected to deliver cargo to the ISS and back in April 2016 was able to land the first reusable stage of the Falcon 9 launch vehicle on a platform in the Atlantic Ocean for the first time.

In the end, in 2017, Blue Origin hired former president of Honeywell Aerospace, Bob Smith, and the New Shepard is now slated to launch in July this year. Nevertheless, the company remains seriously lagging behind SpaceX, which has repeatedly performed manned space flights to the ISS, and recently NASA chose Musk’s brainchild as a company that should take astronauts to the moon. Blue Origin’s lawyers have already filed a complaint to challenge the decision.