Calculating the Size of Apple’s Spaceship

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.

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