Judge Blue Origin by its rocket and the year looks bad. Judge it by its building permits and it looks excellent. On 8 October the company announced Constellation Park in the small town of Hutto, north of Austin. The campus covers 1.3m sq ft (around 121,000 sq m, roughly 17 football pitches). It will produce TeraWave satellites, antennas for the Quartz ground network and subsystems such as solar panels, avionics and telecoms equipment, according to the company. The promise is more than 2,000 new jobs over ten years, on top of the 550 people Blue Origin already employs in Texas.
What it costs and who pays
Design Development Today quotes Governor Greg Abbott: the investment is $554.8m. The state is adding an $18.2m grant from the Texas Enterprise Fund and an almost token $10,000 bonus for hiring veterans. The grant is performance-based, meaning it is paid out against jobs actually created. Divided by 2,000 jobs, it comes to about $9,100 a head. Texas is buying a half-billion-dollar plant with less than 4% public money, which is a pretty good deal for the state.
The county counts differently. Wilco Sun reports that the agreement approved by Williamson County on 20 August refers to $650m over a decade. The gap probably comes down to the time frame and what counts as investment, but there is no official explanation. Hutto and its local economic development agency are also offering incentives, but according to Community Impact the terms will only become public once signed. Local documents cited by Trade & Industry Development are more forthcoming. There the project goes by the codename "Project Blue Hub", the average salary is $88,000, and Blue Origin had been weighing Texas against Florida.
| Who pays | How much | In what form | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Blue Origin (owned by Jeff Bezos) | $554.8m (per the state) | Own investment | Design Development Today |
| Blue Origin, under the county agreement | $650m over 10 years | Investment commitment | Wilco Sun |
| State of Texas (Texas Enterprise Fund) | $18.2m + $10,000 | Job-linked grant | Design Development Today |
| Williamson County, City of Hutto, Hutto EDC | Not disclosed | Local incentives | Community Impact |
Behind all these rows stands one man. Back in 2017 Bezos said he was selling around $1bn of Amazon stock a year to fund Blue Origin, CNBC reported at the time. How much he spends today is unknown, because the company does not publish accounts.
What the factory will turn out
TeraWave was announced in January and is not aimed at households. According to Via Satellite, the constellation will have 5,280 satellites in low orbit and 128 in medium orbit, 5,408 in total, linked by lasers. The target is around 100,000 customers: data centres, armed forces and governments. From low orbit it will offer up to 144 Gbps, while the laser links from medium orbit reach 6 Tbps. Deployment is due to begin in the last quarter of 2027. The project is led by Lindo St. Angel, who came over from Amazon.
Quartz is the other half. According to Blue Origin, the ground station network went live in August with its first three sites in Bermuda, New Zealand and Australia, and should have nine by the end of the year. The first antennas are 3.7 m dishes for S- and X-band; later ones will be 9 metres across, for geostationary orbit and missions beyond the Moon. For now partner RBC Signals handles installation and hosting, but Blue Origin wants to bring that in-house.
The strategy is easy to recognise: rocket, constellation and ground stations under one roof, the model SpaceX used to build Starlink. Add NASA's selection on 2 September of Blue Origin to develop its Mars communications satellite, and the picture is clear. The company no longer wants to be just a carrier.
The problem is the rocket
On 19 April New Glenn left AST SpaceMobile's BlueBird 7 satellite in too low an orbit, because one of the second stage's BE-3U engines failed to deliver enough thrust on its second burn. The FAA grounded the rocket, Kent Reporter reported. Clearance came at the end of May, but on 28 May the rocket for the next mission exploded during a static fire test on the pad. It was due to carry Amazon Leo satellites, which fortunately had not yet been installed.
KeepTrack has described the damage. The first stage was destroyed, the lightning tower came down and the transporter-erector was badly damaged. The pad's main tower can be repaired in place. LC-36 is New Glenn's only pad, so until it is rebuilt the rocket cannot fly. According to chief executive Dave Limp, the problem started with the main liquid oxygen valve on one of the seven BE-4 engines. The target is a return by the end of 2026, but KeepTrack thinks the first quarter of 2027 is more realistic.
On the same day Blue Origin announced the factory, Amazon said its Kirkland plant had produced its 1,000th satellite for Amazon Leo. Only 396 are in orbit, however, Via Satellite reports, and hundreds are waiting at Kennedy because Vulcan and New Glenn are both grounded. "We've solved the manufacturing problem," says Amazon. Bezos currently owns two satellite companies with two factories, and in October 2026 both are waiting for rockets, one of which is his own. TeraWave and Amazon Leo are, incidentally, courting the same corporate customers, so in-house competition can't be ruled out.
What I think
The factory is not a mistake. A satellite plant takes two or three years to build, and TeraWave is due to start at the end of 2027. Had Blue Origin waited for New Glenn to fly regularly, it would have been late. The sequencing, though, reveals a bet: Hutto is wagering that the rocket will be fixed before the first satellites roll off the line. If it isn't, Texas will have a new, state-of-the-art warehouse for satellites, just like Amazon's in Florida today.