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="individual"data-entity =”jeff-bezos”> Jeff Bezos- founded area technology business Blue Origin officially cut the ribbon to open its brand-new HQ and R&D facility, located in Kent, Wash.– close by to Amazon’s own head office. The brand-new facility covers 230,000 square feet and rests on a plot of land over 30 acres in size, and will become the base of operations for around 1,500 Blue Origin employees.
The brand-new HQ is called the O’Neill Building, called after Princeton University physicist Gerard O’Neill. O’Neill is known for his work with NASA in the 1970s, conceiving possible future technology for sustained human presence in area– including the so-called O’Neill cylinders, which are large habitats designed to spin to reproduce Earth’s gravity for long-term citizens and for on-board agriculture. Bezos in 2015 talked about making O’Neill’s vision of the future a truth, detailing
how the habitats may be able to house as lots of as a million people on each station, to assist develop a brand-new extension of humanity’s home in the world. In overall, Blue Origin utilizes more than 2,500 people, including at its facilities in Cape Canaveral, Fla.; Van
Horn, West Texas; and Huntsville, Ala. It likewise plans to open a devoted engine manufacturing facility in Alabama this March. 2020 should also see Blue Origin fly its very first human passengers aboard New Shepard, its sub-orbital rocket, which is currently well along the course to human accreditation, and it’s looking to next year to begin operating New Glenn, its orbital launch lorry.