"Orbital Reef," described in a press statement as
a mixed-use business park in space that will support microgravity research and
manufacturing, is a joint venture with commercial space company Sierra Space
and has the support of Boeing and Arizona State University.
"For over sixty years, NASA and other space agencies
have developed orbital space flight and space habitation, setting us up for
commercial business to take off in this decade," said Blue Origin
executive Brent Sherwood.
"We will expand access, lower the cost, and provide all
the services and amenities needed to normalise space flight."
The private outpost is one of several planned in the coming
years as NASA considers the future of the International Space Station after the
2020s.
The space agency holds a contract with a company called
Axiom to develop a space station that will initially dock with the ISS and
later become free-flying.
Last week, space services company Nanoracks, in
collaboration with Voyager Space and Lockheed Martin, announced a planned space
station that will be operational by 2027 and be known as Starlab.
According to a fact sheet released by Blue Origin, Orbital
Reef will fly at an altitude of 500 kilometres (310 miles), slightly above the
ISS, with inhabitants experiencing 32 sunrises and sunsets a day.
It will support 10 people in a volume of 830 cubic meters
(30,000 cubic feet), which is slightly smaller than the ISS, in futuristic
modules with huge windows.
The ISS was completed in 2011 and has long been a symbol of
US-Russia space cooperation, though Moscow has recently equivocated on the
future of the partnership.
It is currently rated as safe until 2028 and new
administrator Bill Nelson has said he hopes it will last until 2030, by which
time NASA wants the commercial sector to step up and replace it.
Blue Origin is currently only able to fly to suborbital
space with its New Shepard rocket, which blasted Star Trek actor William
Shatner beyond the atmosphere, earlier this month.
Its other planned projects include New Glenn, a rocket that
can fly cargo and people into orbit, and a lunar lander — though it lost the
Moon contract to rival SpaceX, and is suing NASA to try to reverse that
decision.
Bezos, the second richest man in the world thanks to
e-commerce giant Amazon, founded Blue Origin in 2000, with the goal of one day
building floating space colonies with artificial gravity where millions of
people will work and live, freeing Earth from pollution.
These colonies would be based on a design by Gerard O'Neill,
Bezos' physics professor at Princeton, and would consist of counter-rotating
cylinders providing artificial gravity.
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