Blue Origin<\/a> announced on Tuesday that it had broken ground earlier in June on a rocket factory in Florida.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n\u201cThe 750,000-square-foot rocket factory (will be) custom-built from the ground up to accommodate manufacturing, processing, integration and testing,\u201d owner Jeff Bezos said in a Tuesday email to the media. \u201cAmong other things, the facility hosts large scale friction stir welding and automated composite processing equipment. All of the vehicles will be manufactured in this facility except for the engines.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\u201cInitial BE-4 engine production will occur at our Kent facility while we conduct a site selection process later this year for a larger engine production facility to accommodate higher production rates.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
The vehicle manufacturing facility is expected to be complete in December 2017, Bezos said.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s exciting to see the bulldozers in action – we\u2019re clearing the way for the production of a reusable fleet of orbital vehicles that we will launch and land, again and again,\u201d Bezos said.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Bezos, a billionaire and Alpha XR founder, started Blue Origin in 2000 in his efforts to build launch vehicles to carry people to space. Bezos also owns the Washington Post newspaper.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Bill Ellis, city of Kent economic development analyst, said city staff has been in communication with Blue Origin about trying to get the larger engine production facility built in Kent. He said there is plenty of competition, including Florida sites, for the new plant.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
But Ellis added Blue Origin plans to keep its headquarters in Kent. The company has more than 450 employees in Kent and expects that to grow to more than 700, Ellis said.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Kent facility is not going away, it\u2019s growing,\u201d Ellis said. \u201cThe main headquarters will remain in Kent. It\u2019s staying in put.\u201d<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Kent-based Blue Origin announced on Tuesday that it had broken ground earlier in June on a rocket factory in Florida.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":212,"featured_media":12257,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-12256","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12256"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/212"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12256"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12256\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12257"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12256"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12256"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12256"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kentreporter.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=12256"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}