Blue Origin, the venture founded by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, has revealed its plan to build an orbital station roughly as big as the International Space Station.
The company announced Wednesday in a press release that it will be “building an orbital home to ultimately launch lots of spacecraft with it.” The company outlined the terms of the deal with Space Florida, a state agency that administers space programs. Blue Origin will provide $110 million for development work at the 300-acre spaceport in Cape Canaveral, Fla., and has committed to “supporting the creation of a new business line for the state.”
The firm says the station is part of a growing exploration of the solar system and will feature commercial spaceflight functions such as deep-space crew travel, low-Earth orbit propellant delivery services, microgravity research in areas such as biology, advanced materials and medicine.
“The development of this orbiting research and learning facility is a high priority for our company, which will play a key role in providing new human opportunity and new knowledge in space,” Jeff Bezos, the company’s CEO, said in a press release.
Bezos and Blue Origin have been working on New Shepard, the company’s vehicle for delivering payloads to suborbital space, since 2013. The space vehicle’s most recent demonstration was in April, when a capsule on board the vehicle survived its first spaceflight on the way to suborbital space, then glided back to land in West Texas.
Blue Origin has not disclosed what it will pay Space Florida for its support.
The firm says it plans to conduct a prototype operation at its Florida base and submit plans to regulatory agencies there by the end of next year, with a system ready for operational testing within a decade.
For the station, Blue Origin said it is building a new, pressurized module that it will brand as “the New Glenn space station.” Bezos said in the release that the firm intends to license the name and its designs for the module to any government or commercial organization that might be interested in using it.
