Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is heading to Cape Canaveral next month to make a “significant announcement regarding the emerging commercial launch industry” — most likely about plans for his Blue Origin space venture to build and launch rockets on Florida’s Space Coast.
The media invitation went out this week for the Sept. 15 event at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. No further details were provided about the subject of the announcement, but Blue Origin has been working for years to secure a Florida facility.
Bezos’ privately financed venture aims to send tourists and researchers to the edge of space in a vertical-launch-and-landing suborbital vehicle called New Shepard. An uncrewed prototype blasted off for its first developmental test flight in April at Blue Origin’s West Texas rocket range. The company is also working on an orbital launch system, with the aim of winning NASA contracts to ferry crew and cargo to the International Space Station. Developing that system is expected to be the focus in Florida.
Florida Today reported that Blue Origin has been negotiating a package with Space Florida and other state agencies that would result in the construction of a manufacturing facility at Exploration Park, south of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, and eventually lead to orbital launches from Space Florida’s Launch Complex 36. Blue Origin President Rob Meyerson recently suggested that orbital flights could begin by the end of the decade.
Last week, Space Florida’s board authorized the state’s economic development agency to wrap up the terms of an agreement for the package, known by the code name “Project Panther,” Florida Today said. The news outlet quoted Howard Haug, Space Florida’s treasurer and chief investment officer, as saying the deal would represent more than $200 million of investment and several hundred jobs.
Bezos founded Blue Origin in the year 2000 to follow through on his childhood dreams of spaceflight, and the venture currently has its headquarters and production facilities south of Seattle, in Kent, Wash. In 2013, Blue Origin lost out to SpaceX in a bid to take control of Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center. Since then, the company has been looking for expansion opportunities in Florida and other areas of the southeast U.S.
In addition to the New Shepard suborbital system and its own orbital launch system, Blue Origin is developing the BE-4 rocket engine for potential use on United Launch Alliance’s next-generation rockets.
