Star Trek nostalgia is a distraction from Blue Origin’s real ambitions

When Alexandra Abrams first walked into Blue Origin’s headquarters and saw a model of the USS Enterprise used in the filming of the first Star Trek series, she thought, “Ally, you are home, this is your mothership.”

That turned out to be a false impression, the former Blue Origin director of internal communications told me last week, after she revealed the company’s dysfunctional culture in an open letter written with twenty current and former employees at Jeff Bezos’ space firm. Their description of a sexist culture and excessive demands on the workers, which the company disputes, led the Federal Aviation Administration to open an investigation ahead of its next suborbital space tourism mission, expected Oct. 12.

The headline passenger? None other than William Shatner, the actor who so famously portrayed Star Trek’s Captain Kirk.

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