Blue Origin has signed a lease on a massive industrial building in Des Moines, Washington, planting its flag in a South King County corridor that's quickly becoming a hub for aerospace manufacturing. The Kent-based rocket and spacecraft company will take over a 265,922-square-foot facility at 21202 24th Ave. S., a building once occupied by Bartell/Rite Aid as a distribution center before it sat vacant.
A Vacant Drugstore Warehouse Gets New Life
The lease, known as Prologis Park SeaTac 3, was announced on behalf of landlord Prologis by brokerage Newmark, according to the Daily Journal of Commerce. The deal brought Prologis's holdings in the Des Moines Creek industrial corridor to full occupancy, a sign of how tight the market for large industrial space has become in the area, according to a Newmark press release.
Newmark Research noted that even as leasing activity has moderated and tenants have more options to choose from, companies continue to make long-term commitments to well-located, highly functional buildings like this one — exactly the kind of bet Blue Origin appears to be making on South King County. The new facility is expected to support hundreds of employees once it's running at full capacity, KING 5 reported.
What Blue Origin Plans to Build There
According to Blue Origin, the King County expansion will include lab work, development, and light production, as confirmed with KING 5. The outlet's reporting is the most detailed account of the project to date, and it notes that specifics such as an opening timeline, investment figures, and exact staffing numbers have not been disclosed. What is clear is that Des Moines now has two major aerospace tenants moving in within weeks of each other, each with its own footprint and its own timeline.
Shield AI Builds Next Door, Betting on Autonomous Jets
Just down the road, San Diego-based Shield AI has signed a lease and begun construction on its own facility at 1800 S. 216th St. in Des Moines Creek Business Park West, according to GeekWire. That 420,000-square-foot building, separate from the Blue Origin site despite the proximity, is expected to finish construction next spring and will serve as the production home for the company's X-BAT aircraft, an AI-piloted fighter jet designed to take off and land vertically, Shield AI said in its own announcement.
Shield AI, which produces aircraft for military contracts, has said it has already signed its Des Moines lease and is building the site out now, with hiring for the program shifted to the region and already underway. The company's initial regional hiring call includes autonomy developers, flight-control software engineers, composite technicians, and shop-floor assembly specialists, per GeekWire's reporting. Shield AI expects full-rate production to eventually ramp up to about 150 aircraft per year by the early 2030s.
Conflicting Timelines and Big Economic Projections
Exactly when the first X-BAT rolls off the Des Moines line depends on which account you read: Shield AI's own announcement says production is planned to begin in 2029 and reach full rate in the early 2030s, while GeekWire reported the company expects the first aircraft to roll off the line in 2028. The company's economic projections are similarly described differently across sources — Shield AI's announcement ties a roughly $73 billion impact to the Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue regional economy through 2046, while GeekWire's reporting describes the same figure as an injection into Washington state's economy over the next two decades. Shield AI projects the program will support about 8,000 regional jobs in the early 2030s and about 27,000 by 2046, though GeekWire describes a similar figure as up to 27,000 direct and indirect jobs.
Those are company projections rather than independently verified outcomes, but they underscore the scale of ambition both companies are attaching to the area. King County already counts more than 45,000 aerospace workers spread across more than 400 companies, and Washington's aerospace supplier base runs past 1,500 firms, according to Shield AI's announcement — a dense existing ecosystem that both companies are counting on for talent and suppliers.
Des Moines Isn't Blue Origin's Only Expansion
The Des Moines project isn't Blue Origin's only big real estate move this fall. Earlier in October, the company announced a far larger 1.3 million-square-foot aerospace manufacturing complex in Hutto, Texas, expected to provide 2,000 jobs, according to the Renton Reporter. That Texas project, called Constellation Park, is expected to serve as a central production hub for several of the company's satellite and communications programs and add more than 2,000 manufacturing and related jobs over the next decade, per the same report. The Des Moines facility, by contrast, is described only as supporting hundreds of employees, with no comparable investment figure attached in available reporting.
Together, the Blue Origin and Shield AI projects mark a notable concentration of aerospace manufacturing investment landing in a single South King County corridor within the span of a few weeks. Whether the job and economic projections tied to Shield AI's X-BAT program play out as described remains to be seen, but for now, a long-vacant drugstore distribution center and a buildout at Des Moines Creek Business Park West stand as the physical evidence that something real is taking shape on the ground.
