Amazon investing $120 million in Florida satellite facility
Amazon continues building infrastructure for its “Project Kuiper” broadband satellite project.
Initially announced in 2019 with a total price tag of over $10 billion and approved by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in 2020, Project Kuiper is intended to build a low earth orbit (LEO) satellite constellation for providing reliable, affordable broadband service to unserved and underserved communities around the world.
Amazon is now underway with construction on a new satellite-processing facility at Space Florida’s Launch and Landing Facility at Kennedy Space Center. The space will be used to prepare and integrate Kuiper satellites with rockets from Blue Origin and United Launch Alliance (ULA) ahead of launches. The 100,000-square-foot facility features a 100-foot tall high bay clean room to allow room for the payload fairing of new heavy-lift rockets.
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The e-tail giant is investing $120 million in new construction and equipment for the facility, and creating up to 50 new affiliated jobs. Amazon says Project Kuiper’s launch agreements will support thousands of suppliers and skilled jobs across 49 states, especially in Alabama, Florida, and Colorado.
Project Kuiper will also begin satellite production at a state-of-the-art manufacturing facility in Kirkland, Wash., by the end of 2023. The new satellite-processing facility in Florida will be used to receive those satellite shipments, conduct final preparations ahead of launches, connect satellites to custom dispensers, and integrate the loaded dispensers with launch vehicles.
The facility is the latest in a series of Amazon investments in the U.S. space and satellite industry, and in the state of Florida. Amazon has secured 77 heavy-lift launch vehicles to deploy its satellite constellation from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.
Project Kuiper infrastructure includes a constellation of over 3,200 satellites in low Earth orbit, affordable, high-performance customer terminals, and ground networking enabled by Amazon Web Services. Amazon is preparing to launch two prototype satellites in the coming months to help test the program’s network and subsystems, and the company expects to begin production launches and early enterprise customer pilots in 2024.
“We have an ambitious plan to begin Project Kuiper’s full-scale production launches and early customer pilots next year, and this new facility will play a critical role in helping us deliver on that timeline,” said Steve Metayer, VP of Kuiper Production Operations, in a corporate blog post. “We are proud to partner with Space Florida to bolster the growing space industry in Florida and elsewhere across the United States, and we look forward to adding more talent to our skilled operations and manufacturing team. These employees will play an important part in our mission to connect tens of millions of customers worldwide.”