© Reuters. FILE PHOTO: The logo of Amazon is seen at the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at the Porte de Versailles exhibition center on June 15, 2023 in Paris, France. Reuters/Gonzalo Fuentes/File photo
by Joy Roulette
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Amazon (NASDAQ:) is building a $120 million processing facility at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida for thousands of its planned Kuiper Internet satellites, company and state officials said on Friday.
The 100,000-square-foot building is part of the nearly $10 billion Amazon has vowed to invest in its Kuiper project, a planned network of 3,200 low-Earth-orbiting satellites designed to broadcast broadband Internet globally.
The Kuiper Internet network, which will largely compete with Elon Musk’s SpaceX’s Starlink, is expected to complement Amazon’s web services powerhouse.
After being built at the Kuiper project’s primary plant in Redmond, Washington, the Florida facility will employ 50 employees and will be the final stop for Amazon’s Kuiper satellites before they head into space. The ten-story tall room will allow the satellites to fit into the rocket payload fairing, which is the protective covering around the satellites that sit atop the rocket.
Amazon began construction of the site in January and plans to complete it by the end of 2024, with the goal of sending the first batch of its satellites to the area for processing in the second half of 2025, said Steve Metaire, Amazon’s vice president of Kuiper production operations.
That target date would kick-start a race for Amazon to deploy half of the network into orbit by 2026, as required by US regulators.
The company has received 77 heavy-lift rocket launch contracts potentially worth billions of dollars in total, mostly from the Boeing-Lockheed joint venture United Launch Alliance and Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin.
Amazon plans to launch its first few prototype satellites into space by the end of the year, followed by its first mass-produced satellites in 2024.
The company said testing of the service with corporate and government customers would begin later that year.
Anna Farrar, a spokeswoman for Space Florida, a state-funded entity to attract space businesses to Florida, said Amazon is eligible to receive money under state grants for transportation-related projects, but “has not received any money to date.”