Blue Origin commits another $600m to its Florida campus

Project Horizon adds an 830,000-square-foot upper-stage factory at Cape Canaveral, weeks before SpaceX’s record IPO and a month after the April New Glenn payload mishap.

Blue Origin will spend $600m on a new upper-stage manufacturing facility at its Rocket Park campus in Cape Canaveral, Florida governor Ron DeSantis announced on Friday.

The building, branded Project Horizon, will run to 830,000 square feet and add 500 aerospace jobs at an average salary of more than $98,000. It is the most ambitious single expansion the company has booked in the state in its decade there.

The announcement landed on a deliberately well-chosen day. The Federal Aviation Administration cleared New Glenn to fly again after the April NG-3 mission lost an AST SpaceMobile satellite when an upper-stage thermal anomaly cut one engine’s thrust below spec.

The booster itself landed cleanly on the droneship “Jacklyn”. Project Horizon is, in plain reading, the long-form answer to the question the April loss prompted: whether Blue Origin can manufacture the upper stages it now needs at the cadence its order book has begun to require.