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Blue Origin Announces Commercial Space Station Plan

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Blue Origin Space Station

Blue Origin’s ambitions are obviously not limited to low-orbit travel. It was announced earlier that it would build its own space station. The space station, named “Orbital Reef”, will be mainly used as an industrial and commercial center, and is expected to start operations between 2025 and 2030. In building the space station, Blue Origin chose to cooperate with Sierra Space. Sierra Space is mainly known as the Dream Chaser space plane. It is estimated that it will be able to carry cargo to the International Space Station in 2022, and of course it can also assist in delivery to Orbital Reef. Other units joining the program include Boeing, Redwire Space, Genesis Engineering Solutions, and Arizona State University. Of course, Boeing is for its Starliner capsule, which can carry people to the space station.

Blue Origin Orbital Reef

Blue Origin Orbital Reef

In the press release, Blue Origin stated that Orbital Reef is basically a “business park” in space and will provide customers in research, industry, and commerce with a complete solution including logistics and transportation. Any customer who wants to “have their own address in space” can join. The capacity of the space station itself is initially estimated to be about 10 people, which is equivalent to the upper limit of the International Space Station, but Orbital Reef will provide a “people-oriented space architecture” and provide “world-class services and facilities.” There seems to be no final decision on the design or size of the space station, but it will have multiple ports for docking of visiting space stations or future expansion modules. Orbital Reef will adopt an open system to allow any customer or country to use these facilities. If market demand expands, the space station and its related facilities will also expand.

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Blue Origin’s only successful plan at the moment is the aforementioned low-orbit tourism. Others, including the New Glenn rocket (expected to be used to launch the Orbital Reef module) and the Blue Moon lunar lander (lost to SpaceX in the bidding case, and are still in a lawsuit) are all gone. Although the goal of launching before 2030 is very ambitious, given the current situation of Blue Origin’s unsuccessful situation, it is really impossible to say whether it can be achieved smoothly.

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