Blue Origin will invest $200 million in Florida and create 330 jobs as it makes the Sunshine State its base of manufacturing and launch operations. The company will keep designing its rockets in Kent.
Blue Origin, the private space-travel company founded by Jeff Bezos, plans to launch its New Shepard rockets from Cape Canaveral, Fla., as the Internet billionaire builds his dream of tourism outside Earth’s atmosphere.
The company, based in Kent, will invest $200 million and create 330 jobs as it makes the Sunshine State its base of manufacturing and launch operations.
The site, Complex 36, has been unused since 2005, according to Blue Origin, after sending 145 launches thundering into space during 43 years of service.
“We’re not just launching here, we’re building here,” Bezos said at a media event Tuesday in Cape Canaveral also attended by Gov. Rick Scott. “Our ultimate vision is millions of people living and working in space.”
The Blue Origin jobs will have an average annual wage of $89,000, according to information it provided to Brevard County’s Board of Commissioners, which last month finalized an $8 million incentive grant for the project.
An additional $10 million was already earmarked by the Florida Legislature.
Bezos said the orbital rockets would be designed in Kent, where it employs about 400, but would be manufactured, assembled, tested and launched at Cape Canaveral, about 50 miles east of Orlando.
The company’s suborbital rockets will continue to be launched in West Texas, where Blue Origin successfully tested its first New Shepard flight vehicle in April.
The Amazon chief executive is one of several entrepreneurs who made fortunes in other businesses and are now turning to space travel.
Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, is ferrying cargo to the International Space Station as founder Elon Musk talks of one day journeying to Mars, while Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic is working on suborbital trips for adventure seekers.
Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s Vulcan Aerospace is assembling the biggest airplane ever built, designed to carry a rocket under its wing and shoot it into space from 30,000 feet.
Blue Origin will create a “21st century” production facility that will manufacture the company’s reusable fleet of orbital launchers, readying them for repeated flights.
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Putting vehicle assembly near the launch site will ease the challenge of processing and transporting “really big rockets,” the company said.
Blue Origin will begin launches from Florida later this decade. In the meantime, it will test its U.S.-made BE-4 engine on the site.
The BE-4 is slated to power United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rocket, scheduled to make its first flight in 2019. United Launch Alliance is a joint venture between Lockheed Martin and Boeing that is the main supplier of U.S. defense launches.
Developing lower-cost ways to ferry tourists to the edge of space, loft astronauts into orbit and send supplies to the space station is a costly and time-consuming endeavor. SpaceX suffered a setback in June when an unmanned cargo rocket exploded minutes after takeoff.
Blue Origin and SpaceX have both tried and failed to retrieve rocket components that normally burn up in flight after launch so they can be reused, which would significantly reduce the expense of space travel.
Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000, seeking to offer sub- orbital flights so passengers can experience weightlessness and see Earth from a distance of more than 50 miles.
The new investment is reviving a local economy devastated when the federal government ended the shuttle program in 2011. SpaceX and United Launch Alliance have also refurbished decades-old sites dating from NASA’s glory years for commercial missions on the cape.
“These launchpads are coming alive again,” Sen. Bill Nelson, a Florida Democrat, said Tuesday.