Blue Origin officially opens its new HQ and R&D center
< a class="crunchbase-link"href="https://crunchbase.com/person/jeff-bezos"target="_ blank "data-type="person"data-entity =”jeff-bezos”> Jeff Bezos- founded space technology company Blue Origin officially cut the ribbon to open its new HQ and R&D center, located in Kent, Wash.– close by to Amazon’s own head office. The brand-new facility covers 230,000 square feet and sits on a plot of land over 30 acres in size, and will ultimately be the main office for around 1,500 Blue Origin workers.
The brand-new HQ is called the O’Neill Building, called after Princeton University physicist Gerard O’Neill. O’Neill is understood for his work with NASA in the 1970s, conceiving possible future innovation for continual human presence in space– including the so-called O’Neill cylinders, which are big habitats developed to spin to replicate Earth’s gravity for long-term citizens and for on-board farming. Bezos last year went over making O’Neill’s vision of the future a reality, detailing
how the environments might be able to house as many as a million people on each station, to help develop a brand-new extension of humankind’s house in the world. In overall, Blue Origin employs more than 2,500 individuals, including at its centers in Cape Canaveral, Fla.; Van
Horn, West Texas; and Huntsville, Ala. It also plans to open a devoted engine production center in Alabama this March. 2020 need to also see Blue Origin fly its very first human travelers aboard New Shepard, its sub-orbital rocket, which is presently well along the path to human accreditation, and it’s seeking to next year to start operating New Glenn, its orbital launch car.