Blue Origin, owned by Jeff Bezos, stated on Friday that the company plans to carry out a major upgrade of its launch facilities in Florida, with the goal of supporting multiple flights per week by the end of this century.
Blue Origin indicates that the company will add two additional launch and landing platforms for its heavy, partially reusable rockets New Glenn. In a blog post, the company stated that this expansion project, costing $330 million and located at the Rocket Park facility in Cape Canaveral, is expected to be completed by the summer of 2027. Once completed, it will enable the company to produce up to 150 New Glenn rocket upper stages per year.
Blue Origin Senior Vice President of Operations, Ian Richardson, wrote in the article: 'There is only one core goal for these investments: to build stronger production capacity to support more tasks and to complete them more reliably and efficiently.'
Looking to the future, the design goal of these infrastructures is to support multiple flights per week by the end of this century, he wrote.
Blue Origin is working hard to increase its launch frequency in order to compete with its main rival, SpaceX under Elon Musk, in the race for commercial and government customers.
The CEO Blue Origin stated last month regarding CNBC's Morgan Brennan that the company's first round of external financing saw "over-subscription." According to a report by The Wall Street Journal, this round of financing raised $10 billion, and the company's valuation reached $140 billion.
The company is also still recovering from a setback in May, when a New Glenn rocket exploded on the launch pad. Blue Origin has been actively repairing the launch pad, with the goal of getting New Glenn back in flight by the end of 2026.
As part of the upgrade plan, Blue Origin indicates that the company is building a new customer integration facility at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in collaboration with the US Space Force. Once in operation, this facility will be capable of "preparing for multiple missions simultaneously."
Richardson indicates that Blue Origin has invested over $3 billion in infrastructure and facilities in Florida. Currently, these facilities are located at more than 20 sites in Broward County and Orange County of the state, employing over 5,000 people.
The aerospace industry is also dealing with the issue of a shortage in launch capabilities, as SpaceX has ceased to provide its main Falcon rocket's commercial payload services in order to prioritize the development of its larger Starship rocket. This change has sparked a wave of investment. A report released this week by venture capital firm Space Capital indicates that the commercial aerospace sector received a total of 92.5 billion dollars in investments during the first three quarters of 2026.
Blue Origin, SpaceX, and other rocket service providers are seeing an increasing demand from companies and governments that wish to send satellites into orbit. Blue Origin and SpaceX both have their own satellite internet services and are also partners with Amazon for launches; Amazon is advancing the construction of its complete Leo low Earth orbit satellite constellation.
The Starlink of SpaceX currently holds a dominant position in the market, with over 11,000 satellites in orbit.
