May 22 (Reuters) – Florida Governor Ron DeSantis on Friday announced a $600 million expansion of Blue Origin’s Rocket Park campus in Cape Canaveral.
The expansion comes as Blue Origin rival, Elon Musk’s SpaceX, prepares to go public targeting a valuation of $1.75 trillion.
Here are a few details on the expansion:
• The new 830,000-square-foot upper stage manufacturing facility will support 500 aerospace jobs, with an average salary of more than $98,000.
• “Project Horizon is the latest and most ambitious chapter in Blue Origin’s decade-long commitment to Florida,” Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp said in a statement.
• Since 2015, Blue Origin has scaled to nearly 4,000 employees and invested more than $2.3 billion across 500 Florida suppliers, Limp said.
• The project will receive support through the Spaceport Improvement Program, a partnership between Space Florida and the Florida Department of Transportation, that has funded Blue Origin’s new pad at Launch Complex 36.
• Blue Origin, which is billionaire Jeff Bezos‘ space company, is currently the only company that manufactures and launches rockets from Florida.
• In April, federal aviation regulators ordered Blue Origin to investigate the upper-stage malfunction of its New Glenn rocket during a failed satellite launch from Florida.
(Reporting by Juby Babu in Mexico City; Editing by Shailesh Kuber)