Aerospace manufacturer Blue Origin is coming to Huntsville, Gov. Kay Ivey announced today.

Blue Origin is an American privately funded aerospace manufacturer and spaceflight services company set up by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos with its headquarters in Kent, Washington.

The company will make up to 30 engines per year for a nearby ULA plant in Decatur and for Blue's New Glenn rocket. It will employ up to 350 with an average salary of $75,000 a year, company President Rob Myerson said.

Adding Blue Origin to Aerojet Rocketdyne's April announcement means 1,150 new rocket engine jobs are coming to Huntsville this year. Aerojet Rocketdyne announced in April that it will also produce new rocket engines in Huntsville.

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The 400,000-square foot facility Blue Origin company will be built in Cummings Research Park West on 40 acres on Explorer Boulevard, said Erin Koshut of the Huntsville-Madison County Chamber of Commerce. The plant could eventually produce 30 engines a year.

"America's next rocket engine will power United Launch Alliance's Vulcan rocket ending the nation's dependence on Russia for access to space for critical national security space systems," Myerson said. "Two BE-4s will b used on each Vulcan booster."

U.S. Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Tuscaloosa) was at the announcement today. "You're going to do well here," he told Myerson, "and we're going to replace that Russian engine."

Huntsvllle Mayor Tommy Battle said the Blue Origin moves helps assure Huntsville's continued prominence in rocket propulsion. "We have both advanced manufacturing and engineering, logistics and design work," Battle said. "We go from the high tech portion of the design and engineering to the actual wrench-turning part of making an engine."

Bezos in 2016 invited AL.com and other media outlets on the first ever tour of the once-secretive company's main factory near Seattle.

Bezos talked then about what the company looks for in an expansion site during a Q&A with reporters.

"The biggest factor there is talented workforce, that you can really hire people who understand the quality demands of aerospace," Bezos said. "You really want to be able to get good assembly and integration engineers, you want to be able to get high quality machinists and machine operators and those jobs today are very sophisticated jobs."

"You want to go some place that's welcoming, that actually wants the company," Bezos added. "Those are probably the two biggest things."

(Updated at 11 a.m. CDT with new information throughout)