Jeff Bezos dons sunglasses, says look at my big rocket factory

[bsaambl]

Clearly, the Amazon founder is enjoying this whole rocket thing.

Over the last several months Blue Origin has begun to reveal details about plans to develop a large orbital rocket called New Glenn. The 82-meter-tall booster will have the capacity to lift 45 tons to low Earth orbit and an impressive 13 tons to geostationary transfer orbit. The company plans for the technology to be fully reusable.

The New Glenn rocket is so big it will be too large to produce at the company's existing facilities in Kent, Washington. So Blue Origin intends to build the BE-4 rocket engine in Huntsville, Alabama and assemble the New Glenn booster in Florida. The company has evidently made substantial progress on the new rocket facility in Florida, as Jeff Bezos showcased Thursday in a video posted to Instagram.

"Manufacturing facility for the heavy-lift New Glenn launch vehicle is coming along nicely," Bezos wrote in the posting. The short video ends with a close-up of Bezos seated in an outdoor chair on top of the factory, chilling in shades, holding a sign that says, "Rocket Factory Coming Soon."

Clearly, Bezos is enjoying this whole rocket thing. So far it's been an expensive hobby, with the Amazon founder putting about $1 billion annually into the company in recent years. But if Blue Origin fulfills the reusability promise of New Glenn, which the company says will be capable of 100 re-flights, his investment may pay off handsomely.

For now, we'll have to be satisfied with suborbital flights and factories—really big factories. New Glenn isn't expected to take flight until 2019, or more likely 2020 at the earliest.