According to statements made on Friday by both the corporation and officials from the state of Florida, Amazon’s satellite facility Is processing at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida with an estimated cost of $120M.
Amazon has committed to investing over $10 billion on the Kuiper project, which is a proposed network of 3,200 low-Earth-orbiting satellites designed to beam broadband internet to users all over the world. The 100,000 square foot structure is a component of this investment.
It is anticipated that Amazon’s online services powerhouse will be complemented by the Kuiper internet network, which will mostly compete with Starlink, which will be developed by Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
After being constructed at the primary plant for the Kuiper project in Redmond, Washington, Amazon’s Kuiper satellites will make one more stop at the facility in Florida before being launched into space. The facility in Florida will have a workforce of fifty people. The satellites will be able to be installed into the rocket payload farings, which is the protective shell that surrounds satellites that sit atop the rocket, thanks to a room that is ten stories tall.
According to Steve Metayer, Amazon’s vice president of Kuiper Production Operations, the company started building on the site in January and aims to finish it in late 2024. The company has set a goal to ship its first batch of satellites to the location for processing in the second half of 2025.
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This target date will mark the beginning of a race for Amazon to put fifty percent of its network into orbit by 2026, as is mandated by authorities in the United States.
The majority of these heavy-lift rocket launch contracts came from the joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed, known as United Launch Alliance, as well as from Jeff Bezos’s space company, Blue Origin. Together, these contracts are potentially worth billions of dollars.
Amazon’s $120M florida satellite plans to send its first few prototype satellites into space by the end of this year, and then in 2024 it will send its first mass-produced satellites into space.
According to the company, testing of the service with customers from corporations and government agencies will commence in that year.
According to Anna Farrar, a spokeswoman for Space Florida, a state-funded agency to recruit space firms to the state of Florida, Amazon is eligible to receive funds as part of a state grant for transportation-related projects but “has not received any funding to date.”
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