It’s no surprise, but they finally admitted that they want the BE-4, because they don’t want to continue Atlas. But at least AJR got hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars in cost-plus contracts to develop an engine that no one wants to buy.
3 thoughts on “ULA’s Decision”
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It doesn’t make sense that the talented people at AJR can’t make a product that people want to buy or find a new business model that takes advantage of the competitive advantage their workforce and institutional knowledge provide.
Sure it does. The engineers and factory rats who built everything up through and including the SSME are long since retired or dead. The cream of the still-working AJR crop has long since been lured away by Blue Origin, SpaceX and others with the unbeatable combo of stock options and the knowledge that what they work on will actually fly and not simply be government-funded busywork destined for a shelf in that big warehouse were the Ark of the Covenant gathers dust..
Explaining his decision to tie up with Blue Origin a few years ago, Tory Bruno mentioned, among other reasons, “all the familiar faces” he saw when touring the Kent, WA factory. Not a few of those “familiar faces” were, doubtless, ex-employees of ULA, but a lot of them would also have been from AJR.
In essence, AJR has built both BE-4 and AR-1 – the cream of the erstwhile AJR built the BE-4 and the former benchwarmers left behind are building the AR-1. There’s your “institutional knowledge.”
Good points but even if AJR current workforce isn’t cream of the crop, they still have the ability to do things that many don’t. They don’t need to be best of the best, they just need a spark of creativity to find their niche in the changing market.
Its like the old example of Samsung getting their start selling fish.