This, by itself, should be damning: > This suppression of dissent brings us to the matter of safety, which for many of us is the driving force for coming forwa

This, by itself, should be damning: > 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.