Blue Origin is entering the New Glen rocket

The infrastructure is designed to support multiple flights per week by the end of the decade.

A rendering of Blue Origin's new upper stage facilities.

Blue Origin announced on Friday morning a major expansion of its landmark launch facility in Florida to eventually launch 150 rockets a year.

The company said it will add two additional launch pads for the New Glen rocket, in addition to the two already under construction at Cape Canaveral. The company is also investing heavily in a new manufacturing facility that will produce up to 150 upper stages for a larger variant of the New Glenn rocket.

In addition, the company plans to procure two additional landing craft to capture and return the first stage of the New Glen rocket (which currently has one, the Jacklin). Finally, Blue Origin said it will add a new customer integration center, built in conjunction with the US Space Force, that will have four payload bays to handle multiple missions simultaneously.

"These investments are focused on one goal: building capacity to support more, more reliable and efficient missions," Blue Origin senior vice president of operations Ian Richardson wrote in an update on the company's website this morning. As we look to the future, this infrastructure is designed to support multiple flights per week by the end of the decade.

To date, Blue Origin has invested about $3 billion in facilities and infrastructure in Florida, largely to support the construction and launch of the New Glen heavy rocket. The company now has more than 5,000 employees in Florida and 500 suppliers in the state.

"Our manufacturing and operations footprint has more than doubled in the past few years and now includes more than 20 sites throughout Broward and Orange counties," Richardson wrote. Blue Origin is the only company and the largest employer for the production, launch and modernization of rockets on the Space Coast.

This appears to be a reference to the successor to the 800-pound gorilla on Florida's Space Coast, SpaceX, which has launched hundreds of rockets into orbit from Florida over the years. Blue Origin has been launched into orbit twice.

But Blue Origin is expanding its rocket capabilities while SpaceX retreats from the commercial launch market with the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy vehicles. As Ars has reported, a growing launch crisis is emerging as commercial satellite customers scramble to purchase Falcon launches after 2028.

This has left a gap for medium- and heavy-duty vehicles that Blue Origin is poised to fill if it can successfully and repeatedly fly New Glenn. The company's previous investments, along with new infrastructure, show that Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos is serious about making this happen.

After a promising start, the New Glenn missile program was halted in late May when a problem with one of the missile's BE-4 engines led to the catastrophic loss of the vehicle and its only launch site, Launch Complex 36A in Cape Canaveral.

Since then, the company has been rapidly redeveloping the site at 36A to support the return-to-flight mission for New Glenn before the end of 2026. While it seems unlikely, the company appears to be on track to resume New Glen launches in the first few months of 2027.

Blue Origin has already announced plans to rebuild 36A as soon as possible, as well as complete the Launch Complex 36B site to support the larger version of New Glenn. This 9x4 variant of the rocket has nine first stage engines compared to the smaller 7x2 variant with seven engines.

The new launch pads announced Friday morning are likely intended to support the larger 9x4 variant, as Richardson wrote: "These pads will be rapidly positioned and built by replicating the design and build approach demonstrated by the LC-36B build."

The 9x4 rocket is designed to carry 70 metric tons to low Earth orbit and more than 20 tons for injection through the moon. The company hasn't confirmed it, but Blue Origin likely needs the 9x4 version as part of its plans to launch a human lander to the moon for NASA as part of the Artemis program. If development goes well, it could launch in 2028.

Eric Berger is the senior space editor at Ars Technica, covering everything from astronomy to private space to NASA policy, and the author of two books: Liftoff, about the rise of SpaceX; and Reentry, on the development of the Falcon 9 and Dragon missiles. Eric is a certified meteorologist living in Houston.