Amazon.com Chief Executive Jeff Bezos said Tuesday that his private aerospace company, Blue Origin, will build and launch rockets at Cape Canaveral on Florida’s Space Coast as it competes against rival projects from fellow billionaires Elon Musk and Richard Branson.
Blue Origin’s new home will be at Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral, about 50 miles east of Orlando, and will manufacture reusable orbital launchers near Kennedy Space Center, Bezos said. Keeping vehicle assembly close to the launch pad will make transportation of the “really big rockets” easier, he said.
The fleet of rockets will be ready to launch later this decade, Bezos said.
Bezos, Musk and Branson are among the major players in the burgeoning commercial space market, where rockets are being designed, built and tested to send humans and cargo to space.
Musk’s company, SpaceX, already has been ferrying cargo to the International Space Station. Virgin Galactic hopes to join Blue Origin in carrying tourists to space, along with building rockets for launching satellites and other payloads.
Virgin Galactic on Monday announced plans to use its LauncherOne rocket for blasting small satellites into orbit. And SpaceX said it would launch two satellites from Cape Canaveral between late 2017 and 2018.
Analyst William Ostrove of the research firm Forecast International said of Bezos, Musk and Branson: “In some ways, they’re all visionaries who see this as future technology that could revolutionize the world, and they want to be at the forefront of it.” It’s also a market that already totals several billion dollars in government and commercial contracts, he said.
But the space firms also have had to endure major setbacks in the past year. Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShip Two crashed during a test flight last October, killing one of the two pilots. And a SpaceX rocket on a cargo mission to the Space Station blew up in June.
Bezos’ Blue Origin has been established for more than a decade, and the hard-driving Amazon CEO said in announcing the firm’s Cape Canaveral plans that “I come by the space bug honestly. As a kid, I was inspired by the giant Saturn 5 missions that roared to life from these very shores.”
He said Blue Origin’s BE-4 rocket engine, which is being developed through a partnership between Blue Origin and the Boeing Co.-Lockheed Martin Corp. joint venture called United Launch Alliance, also will be tested in Florida.
United Launch Alliance is an established builder of launch vehicles. The BE-4 engine will power the first flight of United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rocket, Bezos said.
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