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Blue Origin Breaks Ground on Massive Florida Manufacturing Center
This post Blue Origin Breaks Ground on Massive Florida Manufacturing Center appeared first on Daily Reckoning.
Bulldozers and excavators have begun clearing land at Kennedy Space Center’s Exploration Park where Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin will build a rocket factory rivaling the area’s largest spaceflight facilities. The 475,000-square-foot manufacturing center, which will stand eight stories tall and stretch longer than two football fields, is expected to be completed by early 2018.
A new orbital rocket built there could be ready for a first launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station’s Launch Complex 36 before the end of the decade. This represents a significant leap forward for the space tourism industry and follows a number of successes notched by rival company SpaceX. As these companies move closer to achieving their goals, a number of investment opportunities will become available to the public and we will be attracting them closely.
“We are excited to have begun the site preparation work for our orbital launch vehicle manufacturing facility in Florida,” said Blue Origin President Rob Meyerson. “This is just another big step toward our vision of enabling an enduring presence in space.”
Blue Origin’s New Shepard launching from the company’s private range in West Texas.
Work on the 139-acre site began about eight months after Jeff Bezos, the billionaire founder of Amazon.com and Blue Origin, visited the Cape to announce the company’s intent to build and launch reusable rockets on the Space Coast. Blue Origin expects to invest more than $200 million in facilities, including some to be built at Launch Complex 36.
Blue Origin’s plans leave room for an additional 150,000 square-foot manufacturing building and 50,000 square-foot processing facility that could be added later.
The company, headquartered near Seattle, currently is testing its suborbital New Shepard vehicle, a booster and capsule that have launched to space and landed three times at Blue Origin’s private range in West Texas. A fourth unmanned test flight is expected before the end of this month.
Suborbital flights of paying space tourists could begin within two years. At the same time, the company is developing a larger orbital rocket, powered by engines built in-house, for launch by the end of the decade. Bezos’ long-term goal is to lower drastically the cost of human spaceflight, making it possible for millions of people to live and work in space.
Onward and upward,
David Bross
for The Daily Reckoning
P.S. Our Technology Profits Confidential Editor Ray Blanco has studied how you can invest in space-based companies as well as other technologies like Virtual Reality (VR) right now. You can check out his research on VR here.
The post Blue Origin Breaks Ground on Massive Florida Manufacturing Center appeared first on Daily Reckoning.
This story originally appeared in the Daily Reckoning
Source: http://dailyreckoning.com/blue-origin-breaks-ground-massive-florida-manufacturing-center/
