By Joey Roulette
WASHINGTON, Oct 16 (Reuters) - Blue Origin is targeting multiple flights per week of its New Glenn rocket by the end of the decade, a company executive said on Friday, as it spends billions of dollars on infrastructure needed to match rival SpaceX's launch dominance.
Jeff Bezos' space firm also plans to add more launch and landing pads in Florida for New Glenn, its flagship heavy-lift orbital rocket that has been grounded for the year since exploding on the company's only launchpad
in May.
Blue Origin has invested over $3 billion to date in its sprawling Florida production and rocket integration facilities that span roughly 31 acres with some 5,000 employees, Ian Richardson, senior vice president of operations, said in a company blog post.
A $330 million expansion to those facilities will support production of a heavier-lift version of the rocket, New Glenn 9x4, and is targeted for completion in the summer of 2027, Richardson said, adding it will allow annual production of up to 150 upper stages of the rocket.
"These investments are centered on one goal: building the capacity to support more missions, more reliably, and more efficiently," Richardson said. "As we look ahead, this infrastructure is designed to support multiple flights per week by the end of the decade."
The New Glenn explosion in May, which happened days before a planned launch of Amazon satellites, badly damaged the company's Florida launchpad, where the 30-storey-tall (322 feet) rocket had lifted off three times since its 2025 debut.
New Glenn is expected to return to flight early next year.
Its last flight, in April, was its first mission failure when an issue with the rocket's second stage put a satellite from its customer AST SpaceMobile into the wrong orbit, causing it to fall back into Earth's atmosphere.
Blue Origin is one of the main launch providers for Amazon's budding satellite internet constellation, Leo, which will rival SpaceX's Starlink.
New Glenn's explosion upended Amazon's launch schedule with the rocket, tightening a global launch squeeze that has left dozens of satellite companies desperate for rides to space.
Blue Origin has been pressed to return the rocket to its pad, with CEO Dave Limp seeing it as the company's top priority among an array of other programs, including a multibillion-dollar NASA assignment to build a lunar lander that will return astronauts to the moon.
Elon Musk's SpaceX, the world's most active launch provider, had 165 Falcon missions last year, mostly carrying its in-house Starlink satellites. Musk envisions launching hundreds of missions per year with Starship, the company's next-generation rocket.
(Reporting by Joey Roulette; Editing by Edwina Gibbs)
