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Amazon Founder Jeff Bezos’ To Begin Launching Rockets In Florida

Amazon Founder Jeff Bezos' To Begin Launching Rockets In Florida

Blue Origin, a secretive rocket company started by Jeffrey P. Bezos, the chief executive of Amazon, made a splashy public announcement on Tuesday, saying it will build rockets and send them into orbit from Florida.

Blue Origin has leased Launch Complex 36 at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, the historic site of 145 launches, including those of Pioneer 10 from NASA, the first spacecraft to visit Jupiter, and Surveyor 1, the first craft to make a soft landing on the moon.

But Launch Complex 36 has sat idle for a decade. “Too long,” Mr. Bezos said at the ceremony. “We can’t wait to fix that.”

Blue Origin will also open a factory to assemble rockets nearby. “We’re not just launching from here,” Mr. Bezos said. “We’re building here.”

The company will invest $200 million and create 330 jobs, state officials said.

It is the latest effort to revive Florida’s Space Coast, which was economically battered after NASA stopped flying the space shuttles in 2011. Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, or SpaceX, the rocket company started by Elon Musk, and the United Launch Alliance, a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin, already use nearby launching pads at Cape Canaveral.

In the past, Blue Origin, based in Kent, Wash., south of Seattle, has sometimes waited days or months to mention successes or failures, with Mr. Bezos providing brief updates on Blue Origin’s website.

But even after Tuesday’s public ceremony, exactly what Blue Origin plans to launch from Cape Canaveral remains somewhat mysterious.

The rocket, still unnamed, will be large enough to reach orbit, and it will debut later this decade, Mr. Bezos said. But he did not give specifics about which markets he is aiming for with his business model. “We’re building a vehicle for humans,” Mr. Bezos said in an interview. “That’s my personal passion.”

But such a rocket “can clearly lift payloads of all kinds,” he added.

The first stage of the rocket is intended to be fully reusable — landing vertically back on Earth — unlike most rockets today, which crash back to Earth after one flight.

That approach is similar to SpaceX’s attempts to land the first stage of its Falcon 9 rocket on a floating platform, a first step to refurbishing it and flying it again. Blue Origin had patented the barge landing idea, but SpaceX successfully challenged the patent, and Blue Origin has since given up on the claim.

Blue Origin lost another skirmish with SpaceX last year in the bidding to take over one of two launchpads at the Kennedy Space Center that NASA had used for the space shuttles. After that setback, Blue Origin looked at options in five states before deciding on Launch Complex 36.

In April, Blue Origin completed the first test flight of its New Shepard spacecraft, accelerating past three times the speed of sound to reach an altitude of 307,000 feet above a testing site in West Texas. The capsule, without any passengers, separated and parachuted gently to the ground. The booster, designed to land back on the ground, crashed because of a malfunction in the hydraulic system. New Shepard, which is to take tourists on suborbital jaunts, will continue to launch from Texas.

At the end of his public remarks on Tuesday, Mr. Bezos looked to the future. “I don’t know how long this will take,” Mr. Bezos said, “but one day I look forward to having a press conference with you guys in space.”

 

By Kenneth Chang

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