Jeff Bezos Is Building a Space Station That's Basically a Giant Business Park
Blue Origin—the space firm that Amazon head Jeff Bezos founded in 2000—is partnering with a handful of spaceflight companies and universities to build a "mixed-use business park" in low-Earth orbit, the Kent, Washington-based company announced this week. The partnership, dubbed"Orbital Reef," aims to provide a collaborative space to conduct research in orbit, develop products, and allow tourists the opportunity to experience microgravity.
Orbital Reef is the latest in a series of proposals to expand humanity's presence in orbit as the slowly decaying International Space Station (ISS) inches closer to death. While NASA officially extended the more than 20-year-old space station's life until 2030, experts fear it'll break down before we've launched its replacement.
Sierra Space, the Louisville, Colorado-based firm known for its Dream Chaser spaceplane, is Blue Origin's primary partner on the Orbital Reef project. Boeing, Redwire Space, Genesis Engineering Solutions, and a group of universities led by Arizona State University (ASU) have also signed on.
Scheduled to launch later this decade, the space station will circle the Earth at an altitude of roughly 500 kilometers (310 miles), and will be able to accommodate up to ten occupants. "Think of it as a village. Think of it as many different organizations and people in their own parts of Orbital Reef doing their own activities," Lindy Elkins-Tanton, Ph.D.—the vice president of ASU's Interplanetary Initiative and the principal investigator of NASA's Psyche mission—said in a video announcing the project.
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