Why Does a Space Company Need Factories?

Baiju Bhatt is building a rocket engine factory in Seattle because a space company has to build a lot of factories and other facilities. Factory building was not as big a part of Robinhood. He does not think Robinhood had factories for anything. Robinhood was a digital product.

The rocket team and the satellite engineering team are being built in Seattle, and the core of the company is still in Silicon Valley. Pretty much everybody building the first two satellites and the first two satellite missions is in the Bay Area. Long term, the computer science and computer engineering people probably stay in the Bay Area, along with a lot of the executive functions and the compute sale side of the business. The rocket vehicle manufacturing site is still TBD. There is a launch pad, and a ton of infrastructure has to be built at the launch pad site. Eventually there will be multiple launch pads and, ideally, a really large number of production facilities.

The places where the work happens are more geography specific. Building rocket engines means hiring people who know how to build rocket engines and going where the talent is. A lot of the people who know how to build a launch tower at a launch pad are in Florida.