Just how big is the Cupertino Apple Campus going to be? If you said “spaceship size,” you’d be mostly correct. Enterprising MacObserver writer John Martellaro did some calculations:
I couldn’t find a notation on that drawing of the diameter of the circular building, but I did find scale marks at the bottom. Note that the distance between the outside red arrows is marked as 600 ft. By that scale, I measured the distance between Wolfe Road and Tantau Ave as 2653 ft.
Given that comforting sanity check, I measured the diameter of the Apple spaceship as 1615 ft, plus or minus a few ft., depending on where one places the ruler. That’s a radius of 807.5 ft.
So, if one could magically fly the future Apple spaceship to Arlington, VA and hover over the Pentagon, it would just slightly cover it.
Here’s a rough overlay* showing the Apple HQ, the Pentagon, and top to bottom: a cruise ship, a U.S. nuclear aircraft carrier, what looks like a U.S. Navy Blimp, a WWII battleship, the Empire State Building and a supertanker.
So there you have it. Apple’s spaceship is larger than the Pentagon, Empire State Building, and roughly two WWII-era battleships laid end-to-end. The building will sit on a 150-acre property in Cupertino (owned by Apple, natch) and will support up to 13,000 employees. Completion is expected for 2015.
- The Spaceship Has Landed: Images of Apple’s Cupertino Campus Via Calculating the Size of Apple’s Spaceship
