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 space innovation business Blue Origin officially cut the ribbon to open its new HQ and R&D facility, situated in Kent, Wash.– close by to Amazon’s own headquarters. 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 base of operations for around 1,500 Blue Origin workers.
The new HQ is called the O’Neill Building, named after Princeton University physicist Gerard O’Neill. O’Neill is understood for his deal with NASA in the 1970s, conceiving possible future innovation for continual human presence in space– consisting of the so-called O’Neill cylinders, which are large environments developed to spin to replicate Earth’s gravity for long-lasting citizens and for on-board agriculture. Bezos last year talked about making O’Neill’s vision of the future a truth, detailing
how the environments might be able to house as many as a million people on each station, to assist develop a brand-new extension of mankind’s house on Earth. In overall, Blue Origin employs more than 2,500 individuals, including at its facilities in Cape Canaveral, Fla.; Van
Horn, West Texas; and Huntsville, Ala. It also plans to open a dedicated engine production facility in Alabama this March. 2020 must also see Blue Origin fly its first human travelers aboard New Shepard, its sub-orbital rocket, which is currently well along the course to human certification, and it’s looking to next year to begin operating New Glenn, its orbital launch vehicle.