Jeff Bezos might need felt triumphant when he rocketed towards the fringe of area final month, however apparently the identical can’t be mentioned about different staff at Blue Origin. On Friday, CNBC was first to report that over a dozen engineers had left Bezos’s firm in latest weeks, with some departing for high-ranking roles at rival spaceflight outfits.

Among the key names that departed Blue Origin had been Nitin Arora—the lead engineer on Blue Origin’s lunar lander program—and Lauren Lyons, who announced earlier this month that she’d taken on a task because the Chief Operating Officer at Firefly Aerospace. Arora, in the meantime, mentioned in a LinkedIn post final week that he’d taken a task at SpaceX. Fox Business confirmed that different distinguished exits from the corporate included ex-NASA astronaut Jeff Ashby, together with Steve Bennet, who helped helm the New Shepard launch program.

Bezos’s firm not too long ago misplaced out to SpaceX for a key NASA contract to develop a lunar lander for the Artemis program, a choice over which Blue Origin is now suing. Earlier this 12 months, NASA backtracked on preliminary plans to award a number of firms with growth contracts for the company’s Human Landing System (HLS) program, as an alternative awarding $2.9 billion in funding solely to SpaceX. Before final week’s lawsuit, Bezos had written an open letter to NASA administrator Bill Nelson, saying that his firm would cowl billions in prices in the event that they may have a bit of the contract.

A Blue Origin spokesperson advised CNBC that, despite the turnover, the corporate was rising at a speedy tempo, including 850 individuals to its headcount in 2020 alone and including one other 650 up to now this 12 months. “We continue to fill out major leadership roles in manufacturing, quality, engine design, and vehicle design,” they mentioned. “It’s a team we’re building and we have great talent.”

Still, these high-profile departures are an excellent reminder that the business of space is usually a laborious one to interrupt into, even for the billionaire founding father of Amazon. We noticed as a lot late last year when Blue Origins chief operating officer exited the corporate, on the heels of multiple missed authorities contracts and a flurry of development delays. Maybe if Bezos put extra effort into holding the corporate collectively and fewer into his cowboy cosplay, Blue Origin can be in higher form than it’s at the moment.