Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeff Bezos announced Tuesday that his space company, Blue Origin, plans to expand its operations to the Space Coast. This site is historically known for 145 launches, including those of Surveyor 1, the first craft that was able to make a soft landing on the moon and NASA’s Pioneer 10, the first spacecraft to pay Jupiter a visit.
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“We’ll be manufacturing our reusable fleet of oribital launchers and readying them for flight again and again”, Bezos said during the announcement.
And according to Bezos, you won’t have to wait to long for a possible trip to space, as Blue Origin plans on “launching from here [Florida] later this decade”. Blue Origin announced a deal earlier this year with United Launch Alliance, a private company that regularly fires USA military equipment into space from Canaveral, to build its next set of booster engines.
In bringing Blue Origins to Florida, Governor Rick Scott said Bezos will pump more than $200 million into the local economy and create 330 jobs, NPR reported. 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.
Bezos, 51, said he became enamoured with space exploration as a young boy watching rockets on television, and thought by now “we’d be gallivanting around the solar system”.
Time will tell, but the Blue Origin announcement could usher in the next wave of young aerospace startups, removing space travel from being a billionaire’s game and changing who gets to explore space forever.
Now it seems the race is on between SpaceX and Blue Origin to develop the world’s first reusable rocket. Bezos founded Blue Origin 15 years ago, following through on his longtime passion for space flight.
“Now we are thrilled to be coming to the Sunshine State for a new era of exploration”. The function of the site is the assembly and launch of rockets. “As a kid, I was inspired by the giant Saturn V missions that roared to life from these shores”, wrote Jeff Bezos, the company’s founder, in a blog post. Its Dragon capsule will begin ferrying astronauts to the worldwide Space station in 2017.
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The April test flight launched from the company’s headquarters in Texas, but now future launches will happen from Cape Canaveral, Bezos said. However, unlike the New Shepard, the upcoming spacecraft would be powered by BE-4 engines instead of the BE-3 engines.
