Amazon has a bold plan to take over SpaceX’s Starlink space shuttle service, but there’s still a lot of prep work to be done before it can begin commercial operations.
Like Starlink, Amazon’s Project Kuiper service will be powered by several thousand small satellites in low Earth orbit, designed to bring fast, affordable broadband to underserved and underserved communities around the world.
Moving toward its goal, the company recently announced it will invest $120 million in a satellite processing facility at Space Florida’s Launch and Launch Facility at the Kennedy Space Center.
The 100,000-square-foot facility will prepare and attach satellites to a United Launch Alliance (ULA) or Blue Origin rocket before being blasted into space from the nearby Cape Canaveral launch pad.
“We have an ambitious plan to begin full-scale production and early customer testing of Project Kuiper next year, and this new facility will play an important role in helping us meet that schedule,” said Steve Metayer, vice president of Kuiper Production Operations.
Metayer added: “We look forward to adding more talent to our skilled operations and manufacturing team. These employees will play an important role in our mission to connect tens of millions of customers around the world.”
Amazon has announced plans to launch two prototype satellites in the coming months to test its network and subsystems.
The company will also begin manufacturing satellites at a facility in Kirkland, Washington by the end of this year. Once built, the satellites will be shipped to Amazon’s new satellite processing facility in Florida for final preparations before launch. The site will have a 100-foot-tall clean room capable of accommodating the cargo handling of new heavy-lift rockets, such as Blue Origin’s New Glenn and ULA’s Vulcan Centaur.
In March, Amazon unveiled the terminals that Project Kuiper customers will use to connect to the Internet service. Amazon said at the time that it wanted a design that offered something “smaller, more affordable and more capable” than those proposed by the likes of SpaceX for Starlink, although details on the cost of the equipment and service have yet to be revealed.
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