Blue Origin is hiring more than 300 new engineers, machinists and technicians and expanding its Huntsville rocket engine plant to meet the needs of its customer United Launch Alliance and power its own rockets, site lead Nathan Harris said today.
Blue Origin in Huntsville spent the pandemic supporting the company’s main engine plant in Kent Washington with parts for the company’s BE-3 and larger BE-4 engines, Harris said. “We are now actually in the process of building our first set of complete engines through our facility,” he said. Those first engines will be produced this year.
“We’re getting very close,” Harris said. “They’re still doing quite a bit of retrofitting. As you learn, anytime you retrofit something that’s over 60 years old, it takes a little bit more and there’s a little bit more that you unearth that was undiscovered.”