Dishonest & incompetent CEO ruin the experience
Pros
At the beginning of 2015, MoonEx had an excellent engineering team, led by Andy Aldrin (son of Buzz Aldrin). The best part of working at MoonEx was learning from this amazing team of smart people. The team was a great balance of experienced and inexperienced engineers. All were smart and new ideas were welcomed. Unfortunately, that's where the Pros stop.
Cons
The CEO, Bob Richards, is dishonest to shareholders and employees alike and is a very poor communicator to the rest of the company. He has failed to provide a vision or roadmap to the engineering staff other than paying lip service to the GLXP goals without a real intent to meet them (the CEO does not consider the acquisition of a launch vehicle as a priority). The consensus among the engineering team was that he just wants to live the life of a CEO without furthering the companies stated goals. In January of 2015, Bob fired Andy for reasons that made no sense to the rest of the company. A month later, he fired the majority of the engineering team because they had the gall to disagree with his decision. A month after that, Bob closed the MoonEx offices at NASA Ames Research Park, did significant damage to the relationship between MoonEx and NASA, and moved what remained of the company to Florida. All of these decisions were made without consultation with the engineering team and without warning. Employees at MoonEx are paid very poorly, especially the younger ones, and are expected to work 60 hour weeks even though they are not given clear direction on what they should be working on.
