The company is headquartered on 11 hectares (26 acres) of industrial land in Kent, Washington, a suburb of Seattle, where its research and development is located. The facility was 24,000 m2 (260,000 sq ft) in size in early 2015,[3] growing to 28,000 m2 (300,000 sq ft) by March 2016 with Blue Origin leasing additional space in adjacent office buildings. As of March 2016[update], the Kent facility housed engineering, manufacturing and business operations and the majority of the 600-person[4] Blue Origin workforce, which grew from about 350 persons at Kent in May 2015.[3] They added an additional 42,630 m2 (458,900 sq ft) of office, manufacturing and warehouse space to their headquarters facilities in 2016 and 2017.[5][6]
In late 2017, Blue Origin purchased an additional 13 hectares (31 acres)—adding to their existing 11 hectares (26 acres)—of land on which they plan to build another 32,000 m2 (340,000 sq ft) of facility in Washington state.[7]
Florida facilities
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Blue Origin's Orbital Launch Site (OLS) manufacturing facility, 2019
In September 2015, Blue Origin leased Launch Complex 36 (LC-36) in Cape Canaveral, Florida to build a launch pad for their orbitallaunch vehicleNew Glenn. As of March 2016[update], the first Blue Origin launch from LC36 was planned for 2020. An August 2015 estimate predicted that initial launch happening earlier than 2020.[8] Ground-breaking for the facility to begin construction occurred in June 2016.[9] By March 2018, Blue's construction at LC-36 was lagging, but the company stated they did not think it would delay achieving the anticipated 2020 initial launch of New Glenn.[10] However as of 2022 Blue Origin does not expect to launch New Glenn until 2023 at the earliest.[11] The factory was complete by 2020 and was being used for the construction of New Glenn prototypes by 2021.[12]
The Blue Origin orbital launch site will be situated on a total of 306 acres of leased land assembled from former Launch Complexes 11, 36A, and 36B. The land parcel will be used to build a rocket enginetest stand for the BE-4 engine, a launch mount—called the Orbital Launch Site by Blue—and a reusable booster refurbishment facility for the New Glennlaunch vehicle, which is expected to land on a seaborne platform and returned to Port Canaveral for refurbishment.
In addition, the manufacturing of "large elements, such as first stages, second stages, payload fairings, etc." will occur at the Blue Origin launch vehicle factory on Space Commerce Parkway in nearby Exploration Park, near the entrance to the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex on Merritt Island.[13]
Landing platform ship
In October 2018, Stena Freighter, 182 meter cargo-ship purchased from ferry operator Stena Line, arrived in Florida from Spain. CEO Bob Smith, confirmed Stena Freighter would be used as the landing platform vessel for first-stage boosters.[14] The landing ship will be hydrodynamically stabilized.[15]
Launch Site One suborbital launch and engine test site
Included are three test cells just for testing the methalox BE-4 engine alone: two full test cells that can support full-thrust and full-duration burns, as well as one that supports short-duration, high-pressure preburner tests, to "refine the ignition sequence and understand the start transients."[17]
The 2020 ribbon-cutting at the Huntsville facility.
^Foust, Jeff (19 March 2018). "A changing shade of Blue". The Space Review. Retrieved 31 May 2018. construction at LC-36. The Air Force ... limits work that can be done on "critical days" around launches, to avoid construction work that could cause mishaps—broken pipelines or severed cables—that would delay those launches. "Part of building is that you've actually got to be able to put a shovel into the ground", Henderson said. "On a critical day at Cape Canaveral you cannot break the surface of the ground". The number of critical days has been growing, in part because of increased launch activity. In 10 of the previous 12 months, he said, more than half of the work days were deemed critical days. "It's nearly impossible to build a project under those kinds of constraints".