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- established space technology business Blue Origin formally cut the ribbon to open its brand-new HQ and R&D center, situated in Kent, Wash.– nearby 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 become the base of operations for around 1,500 Blue Origin employees.
The brand-new HQ is called the O’Neill Building, named after Princeton University physicist Gerard O’Neill. O’Neill is known for his deal with NASA in the 1970s, developing prospective future innovation for continual human existence in area– consisting of the so-called O’Neill cylinders, which are big habitats designed to spin to reproduce Earth’s gravity for long-term citizens and for on-board farming. Bezos in 2015 discussed 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 new extension of humankind’s house in the world. In total, Blue Origin utilizes more than 2,500 people, including at its centers in Cape Canaveral, Fla.; Van
Horn, West Texas; and Huntsville, Ala. It likewise plans to open a dedicated engine manufacturing center in Alabama this March. 2020 must likewise 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 seeking to next year to begin running New Glenn, its orbital launch automobile.