Spaceship to land in Cupertino, Calif.

Joe Pompeo
·Media Reporter

The City of Cupertino, Calif., has unveiled plans (see rendition above) for a circular spaceship dock designed as a welcome center for the aliens it expects to reach Earth by the year 2050.

Kidding! That's actually a depiction of the futuristic office Apple wants to build in the Silicon Valley town where the tech giant is headquartered. Chief executive Steve Jobs made an appearance at the Cupertino City Council meeting Tuesday night to discuss the proposal.

"It's clear that we need to build a new campus," said Jobs. "We're just out of space. And that doesn't mean we don't need the one we've got, we do need it, but we need to augment it. And so we've got a plan that lets us stay in Cupertino."

Apple's plan calls for an overhaul of a 150-acre former Hewlett Packard lot recently acquired by the company, atop which the four-story, perfectly circular office space for 12,000 will rest. (Jobs did in fact liken the design to a "spaceship.") Parking will be located underground to accommodate a total of 6,000 trees--including apricot orchards--that will shade the lot.

Jobs made it clear that if Cupertino rejected the plans, he'd take them to neighboring Mountain View, which is home to Google. But it looks like that won't be necessary. "There is no chance we are saying no," the mayor said. You can watch the full presentation below and view additional images over at cupertino.org.

Apple's Cupertino location is built into the fiber of its products--the icon for the native mail application on Macintosh computers is an image of a postage stamp that reads "Hello from Cupertino CA." On the company's popular iPhone, the icon for the Maps application depicts Interstate 280, and the company's current campus.

The council meeting was Jobs' second public appearance of the week. The tech guru is currently on an unspecified medical leave from Apple, and when he took the stage at a software conference in San Francisco the previous day, observers noted that he looked particularly frail and fatigued.