The private space tourism era looked so very promising five years ago. Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic had begun flying customers—real people with zero space experience—on suborbital missions. And at about the same time, private citizens were going to orbit for days at a time aboard SpaceX's Crew Dragon.

But that was then. Consider the state of play today:

• It has been 10 months since Blue Origin's New Shepard spacecraft flew its last mission in January. The program was subsequently "paused," but let's be real. Blue Origin has moved on. New Shepard's engineering teams are now supporting the New Glenn rocket and Blue Moon lander programs.
• SpaceX flew its final free-flyer mission on Dragon, Fram2, in April 2025. A handful of non-NASA missions bound for space stations remain on the spacecraft's manifest, but all are likely to carry at least one government astronaut. Then Dragon will be retired. There is no credible timeline for SpaceX's Starship to fly humans into space from Earth.
• As for Virgin Galactic, the company flew its final suborbital mission on the VSS Unity spacecraft more than two years ago, in June 2024.

So we are now 10 months, and counting, without a space tourism mission in the United States.

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Blue Origin is taking over an industrial building in Des Moines, Wash., where the Jeff Bezos-founded space company plans a mix of lab, development and light production work, the company confirmed to GeekWire.

The 265,922-square-foot facility, known as Prologis Park SeaTac 3, was previously a Bartell Drugs distribution center just south of Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. Blue Origin said that at full capacity over the long term, the site is expected to support hundreds of employees.

KING 5 first reported the news Tuesday, citing a state environmental application filed in September that lists Blue Origin Manufacturing LLC at the building’s address, 21202 24th Ave. S. A pre-application under review by the city indicates the property could be used for research and development of commercial satellites, the station reported.

Commercial real estate firm Newmark announced a lease for the entire building last week without naming the tenant.

“The manufacturing project that will be using this property is cutting-edge and we are excited about the job growth and possibilities that it represents for our region,” Newmark Executive Vice Chairman Thad Mallory said in a news release.

With roughly 33,000 residents, the small city of Des Moines is becoming something of an aerospace hub.

Blue Origin’s new location is around the corner from where Shield AI is building X-Forge 3, a 420,000-square-foot facility that will make the company’s X-BAT autonomous fighter jet. Shield AI said last month it expects to have 4,000 workers in the region by the early 2030s, and that it’s looking for another 1 million square feet.

“It’s all about labor and access to power,” Mallory told KING 5, referring to the advanced manufacturing projects coming to the area.

Blue Origin is headquartered in nearby Kent, Wash., about 5 miles from the Des Moines site.

The company is working to get its New Glenn rocket flying again after one exploded during a ground engine test in May, which damaged its Florida launch pad. New Glenn is slated to carry Blue’s Blue Moon Mark 2 lander on NASA’s Artemis 3 mission, a test in Earth orbit planned for mid-2027 ahead of a crewed moon landing targeted for 2028.

Blue Origin announced a major expansion of its already considerable Florida launch facilities on Friday morning with the intent of eventually flying more than 100 rockets a year from there.

The company said it would add two launch pads for the New Glenn rocket, in addition to two already under construction at Cape Canaveral. The company is also investing heavily in a new manufacturing facility that will produce up to 150 upper stages for a larger variant of the New Glenn rocket.

The company also plans to procure two additional landing ships to catch and return the first stage of the New Glenn rocket (it currently has one, named Jacklyn). Finally, Blue Origin said it would add a new customer integration facility, built in conjunction with the US Space Force, that will feature four payload bays to process multiple missions at the same time.

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When Jeff Bezos sat down on Blue Origin’s Cape Canaveral factory floor for an interview with Fox News’ Bret Baier earlier this week, he laid out an unapologetic defense of free enterprise and wealth creation.

“Success is not villainy,” Bezos said.

The Amazon founder’s point was simple: building a massively successful enterprise isn’t something society should apologize for or view with suspicion, it’s the natural result of creating something people actually want.

“There’s nothing wrong with making unbelievably good chicken that people love,” Bezos said, referencing the growth of Raising Cane’s and why restaurant entrepreneurs deserve their wealth. “And it doesn’t make him a bad person.”

Bezos, who stepped down as CEO of Amazon in 2021 and left Seattle for Miami in 2023, is currently the second richest person in the world with an estimated net worth of $380 billion, according to Forbes.

Bezos and Amazon transformed the Seattle region. The company now employs roughly 50,000 corporate and tech workers in the Puget Sound region, divided between its primary headquarters in Seattle and its growing operational footprint in Bellevue.

And his recent comments come at a key moment for Washington state, where voters will decide on Initiative 645 — a high-profile ballot measure aimed at repealing the state’s recently enacted high-earner tax and prohibiting future income taxes.

Bezos, along with other business leaders like former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, have claimed that scapegoating wealthy entrepreneurs risks driving away innovation. Bezos argued that politicians targeting business leaders are misdiagnosing the problem, noting that while affordability and social challenges are real, heavy-handed government interventions often fail to solve them.

“If there’s a politician who’s picking villains and pointing fingers, that probably means they don’t have a solution,” Bezos said. He noted that executives who relied on blame-shifting inside his own companies “wouldn’t be in our company for long.”

Watch the full interview below where Bezos also discusses the impact of AI on jobs, the need to beat China in the race to the moon and orbital data centers in space. The portion of the interview where Bezos notes that “success is not villainy” starts in minute 16.