Amazon is building a $120 million processing facility at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida for thousands of planned Kuiper Internet satellites, company and state officials said Friday.
The 100,000-square-foot building is part of about $10 billion that Amazon has pledged to invest in its Project Kuiper, a planned network of 3,200 Earth-orbiting satellites designed to send broadband internet globally.
Kuiper's web, which will largely rival Elon Musk's SpaceX company Starlink, is expected to complement Amazon's web services hub.
The Florida facility will employ 50 employees and will be the last stop for the Amazon Kuiper satellites before they go into space after they are manufactured at Project Kuiper's base plant in Redmond, Washington.
A room ten stories high would allow the satellites to be installed in the rocket's payload spaces, the protective shell around the satellites that sits atop the rocket.
Steve Metayer, Amazon's vice president of production operations at Kuiper, said Amazon began building the site in January and plans to complete it by late 2024, with the goal of shipping 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, as it embarks on a sprint to get half the network into orbit by 2026, as required by US regulators.
Amazon plans to launch the first prototype satellites into space by the end of the year, followed by launching the first mass-produced satellites in 2024.
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