Most notable of these launches included the Pioneer 10, the Surveyor 1, and the Mariner missions – the first USA spacecrafts to visit other planets.
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Though Bezos revealed few details about Blue Origin’s flight plans, he said there would be a “21st century production facility where we will focus on manufacturing a reusable fleet of orbital launchers”.
“The site saw its last launch in 2005 and the pad has stood silent for more than 10 years – too long”, Bezos said. “We’re not just launching here, we’re building here”, Bezos said at a media event Tuesday in Cape Canaveral also attended by Florida Gov. Rick Scott.
Blue Origin previous year announced a contract to build rocket engines for United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of Boeing (NYSE:BA) and Lockheed Martin (NYSE:LMT).
Blue Origin will invest $200 million in Florida and create 330 jobs as it makes the Sunshine State its base of operations. He showed off a concept sketch of a new orbital launch vehicle, nicknamed Very Big Brother, during his Tuesday announcement. But it’s still every bit as ambitious as SpaceX or Virgin Galactic.
Even before Amazon had its first profitable year, Bezos was throwing money into Blue Origin as far back as its founding in 2000.
Blue Origin’s plan is much like SpaceX’s-the company was embroiled in a bitter patent suit with Elon Musk’s company over plans to land a rocket on a floating platform at sea in order to eventually reuse it. That suit was dropped earlier this month.
As for a launch site, Bezos has his sights set on Cape Canaveral Air Force Station’s Launch Complex 36, which has gone unused for a time. “We’re not just going to launch here, we’re building here”, Bezos said at a press conference at Cape Canaveral today.
Blue Origin will likewise open a plant to collect rockets close-by.
Bezos, 51, developed an interest in space exploration as a young boy watching rockets on television, and had thought that by now “we’d be gallivanting around the solar system”.
Above: Complex 36 with the Pioneer-10 (or F) spacecraft atop the Atlas-Centaur launch vehicle prepared for launch to Jupiter. Florida’s Space Coast may be getting a bit more crowded, though this is one congested strip of coastline I’m sure no one will complain about.
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Bezos’s company will join a growing number of commercial entities that are slowly transforming the center into what NASA calls a “multi-user spaceport”, and reinvigorating a historic stretch of coast, which has suffered since the retirement of the space shuttle in 2011.
