Blue Origin Successfully Completes New Shephard’s First Human Flight

Congrats to Jeff Bezos and the entire Blue Origin team for their first human flight into space. It is an incredible achievement for advancing IoT and space travel, and an inspiration to the future aerospace engineers that will follow in their footsteps. This is a continuing arc of history for the Greater Seattle region that reaches back to the Boeing-built rovers that were left behind on the moon by the Apollo 15, 16 and 17 missions nearly a half-century ago.

It was just a short time ago that Blue Origin announced they were opening their new headquarters in Kent, Washington. At the ribbon cutting they stated:

“For those of you that are Washington State residents, what is exciting is we’re going to be doing all this work from a headquarters based here in Kent. It’s a remarkable statement to say that we’re going to fly humans to space, we’re going to build and design large engines and a large orbital rocket…all through work centered here.”

Greater Seattle is a global aerospace and advanced manufacturing hub with notable companies producing spacecraft and launch vehicles, propulsion systems and fuels, navigation and control, computer hardware, software and robotics and much more. This and more has led our region to becoming #2 in the nation for aerospace engineers and home to more than 90 space-specific companies that, according to the Puget Sound Regional Council (PSRC), supports 6,200 jobs and contributes $1.8 billion to Washington’s economy. You can learn more about the talent and companies that call our region home here.

To the 1500+ Blue Origin employees that call Greater Seattle home, keep going! We can’t wait to see what you do next.

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