Tanveer Singh Kapoor, Pune
Amazon is building a $120 million processing facility at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center for its thousands of planned Kuiper internet satellites, as stated by the company and state officials on Friday, July 21.
The 100,000-square-foot building constitutes roughly $10 billion vowed by Amazon to invest in its Kuiper project, a planned network of 3,200 low Earth orbit satellites which are designed to beam broadband internet worldwide.
The Kuiper internet network is expected to complement Amazon’s web services powerhouse. It will primarily compete with Starlink from Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
The Florida facility will employ 50 people and serve as the final destination for Amazon’s Kuiper satellites before they are launched into space, after their production at the Kuiper project’s core plant in Redmond, Washington. A ten-story-tall room will allow satellites to be fitted into rocket payload fairings, the protective shell around satellites that sit on top of the rocket.
Amazon commenced the construction of the site in January, planning to complete it by late 2024. According to Steve Metayer, Amazon’s vice president of Kuiper Production Operations, it targets to ship the first batch of satellites to the facility for processing in the first half of 2025.
Amazon aims to launch its first mass-produced satellites by early 2024, kicking off a sprint to deploy half of the network into orbit by 2026, as US regulators require.
The company has acquired billions of dollars worth of 77 heavy-lift rocket launch contracts, mainly from the Boeing-Lockheed joint venture United Launch Alliance and Blue Origin. It plans to launch its first few prototype satellites into space by year-end.
Amazon stated that the testing of the service with corporate and government customers would begin that year.
Anna Farrar, a spokesperson for Space Florida, said Amazon is eligible to receive funds under a state grant for projects related to transportation but is yet to receive any funding to date.