I started at Blue after having worked for other large aerospace companies in the past. It was different. It was going to change the game. We were going to build rockets and fly people to space and build an even bigger rocket that would get us to orbit and beyond. We would control our own destiny as we weren't beholden to any government customer. We were going to do the smart things and skip all the burdensome government crap.
All was well at first... I soon realized there was a problem with this approach. Space has been done before. We know how to get to orbit. We know how to send people to the moon. We ignored the enormous number of lessons learned and started from scratch. We were arrogant. We are arrogant. We hired smart people, not wise people. We hired people that didn't know why due diligence was important. We put them in charge of major systems. We skipped steps we shouldn't have because we wanted to go fast. We put agreeable people in upper management. We ignore those who remind us of the enormous technical debt we've accumulated by skipping steps because we are smarter than other space companies.
Our technical debt is enormous. As we attempt to prove to just ourselves our vehicle is safe for humans or the engines are ok to sell to customers, we keep seeing that pesky tech debt rear its ugly head in the form of failure after failure during qualification.
The culture that was once vibrant and upbeat has turned toxic. Schedules are simply dates selected that are impossible to meet with current headcount. We don't build them from the bottom up. That's what other aerospace companies do. We're smarter than that. Instead we choose a date, and drive our teams into the ground trying to meet it. All the while deciding what else we can skip to hit this very important date... and the technical debt grows ever larger.