Opening our Valparaíso campus

Valparaíso has always looked outward. Ships have left its harbour for centuries, so it felt right that Halcyon's South American campus should open on the hills above the bay. Last month we welcomed our first 420 staff into the new buildings.

The campus houses avionics laboratories, a systems engineering group and the company's main interior design studio, which I lead. Our work is everything a passenger touches: seats, lighting, galleys, sleep pods and the circulation spaces that make a long journey feel humane.

At the centre of the studio is a full-scale mock-up of a Halcyon Starliner passenger deck. The Starliner carries 1,200 passengers between Earth, Luna and Mars, and its spin-gravity decks are where people spend most of a multi-week voyage. Our mock-up lets us test lighting cycles, acoustic panels and seating layouts with real volunteers before anything is built in orbit.

We are also refreshing the cabin of the Kestrel light shuttle. The Kestrel is one of our oldest designs, first flown in 2179, and it still carries eight passengers on short cislunar hops with two pilots. Commuters fly it every day, so small improvements matter: better window placement, quieter air handling and seats that work for people of every height.

The building itself was designed with local architects to be cooled by the sea breeze and heated by solar thermal collectors. The cafeteria serves food from the Aconcagua valley, and the rooftop terrace has a direct view of Kestrel launches from the coastal pad.

The campus is also a hiring commitment. We expect to grow to roughly 1,100 people over the next three years, with roles in avionics, systems engineering, interior design and customer support for South American operators. More than 60 percent of our first cohort were hired locally, and we are partnering with two universities in the region on apprenticeships in composite manufacturing and cabin acoustics. A shipyard is only as good as the community around it, and Valparaíso is a very good community.

We will host open studio days every month for local students. If you are in Valparaíso, come and sit in a Starliner seat before anyone else in the system does.