The firm announced Tuesday a $200 million investment in building rockets and capsules in Florida and lifting them off from Cape Canaveral.
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Long before he was conjuring up ways to sell us everything from a basketball hoop to tiny parts to fix our ceiling fans, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos was a space nut. “The state provides the ideal business climate for innovative companies like Blue Origin to come to Florida and succeed, and we look forward to watching them push this industry to places it has yet to go”. The Mariner missions – the first U.S. spacecraft to visit other planets – lifted off from Complex 36. “This is a great day for our nation’s space program, for Florida’s space coast, for our state as a whole, and we’re proud to welcome native Floridian Jeff Bezos home to launch us into the future like this”.
The event featured several notable figures within the aerospace industry and Florida, including Governor Rick Scott.
Blue Origin, the private space travel company founded by Amazon.com Inc.
– CNN’s Rachel Crane contributed to this piece.
“This is something I’ve been thinking about and dreaming about since I was a little boy”, Bezos said in an interview. “That’s pretty cool”, Bezos said.
Blue Origin recently said that it hopes to qualify the engine for flight in 2017, with the first flight of the Vulcan rocket system planned for two years later.
“The pad has stood silent for more than 10 years”. So it seems like Bezos is finally ready to start sharing more information about Blue Origin, after spending years keeping most of the company’s progress under wraps.
Bezos did not provide many details about Blue Origin’s plans, but his company has been pioneering sub-orbital rockets and capsules that are intended to head into space both with research equipment and eventually paying tourists.
Blue Origin plans to design the spaceship to carry passengers and payloads to around 100km above the Earth.
For a full transcript of Bezos’ address, head over to Blue Origin’s official website.
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.
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SpaceX, which made history as the first private company to send cargo to the international Space Station, blasts off its Falcon 9 rockets from launch pad 39A, the same spot from which the Apollo missions to the moon departed.
