Amazon planning a Florida site in quest to sell internet from space
Amazon.com plans to build a $120 million satellite-processing facility in Florida to support Project Kuiper, an initiative to sell internet access from space.
The facility, still under construction, will be used to prepare Kuiper satellites before they’re sent into orbit. It’s located at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center and is next door to key launch sites.
Project Kuiper is similar to Space Exploration Technologies’ Starlink, which uses thousands of satellites in low orbit to beam broadband internet to Earth. Amazon plans to launch 3,236 satellites as part of its initiative, forming a network that can get hard-to-reach parts of the world online.
“When we realized the scale of our constellation and the launch rate we have to have, it was pretty apparent to us that we had to have a significantly effective and efficient payload-processing facility,” said Steve Metayer, vice president of productions and operations for Kuiper at Amazon.
Amazon hasn’t provided an exact target for how many customers it could reach through Kuiper, but Chief Executive Officer Andy Jassy said in April it
“has the chance to be a very large business.” Jassy said hundreds of millions of people aren’t fully connected to the web yet.
It’s not yet clear when Kuiper satellites will be regularly traveling to space, though Amazon has lined up several rockets. In April 2022, the Seattle e-commerce giant signed a deal with three launch companies, including Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin, Arianespace and the United Launch Alliance.
Together those companies agreed to carry out as many as 83 launches, with ULA’s Vulcan rocket responsible for the largest portion. Vulcan hasn’t yet gone to space, nor have two of the other rockets, Blue Origin’s New Glenn and Arianespace’s Ariane 6. In a separate deal, Amazon contracted ULA’s Atlas V, which is operational, to carry out nine Kuiper launches.
To be compliant with its license with the Federal Communications Commission, Amazon needs to launch half of its Kuiper constellation by 2026. The company expects to finish the processing facility by 2024 and start operations there in 2025. Metayer said he believes Kuiper will stay on track.
“I’m obviously very confident in our own technology, our own satellites,” he said. “And we’re also very confident that the partners we have — the progress they’re making on their launch vehicles, too.”
Amazon plans to ship its newly built satellites from its manufacturing plant in Kirkland, Washington. At the Florida site, the satellites will be inspected and prepared. They’ll then be placed in the rockets’ payload fairing, or nose cone – the massive, bulbous structures located on top of the rockets.
Since Arianespace’s Ariane 6 is expected to take off from a spaceport in French Guiana, Amazon’s new processing facility will be focused on preparing for New Glenn and Vulcan launches.
While ULA and Blue Origin will have processing facilities, Amazon said it needed its own to prepare for multiple flights at one time. The Florida center is designed to work on three rocket launches simultaneously and to process 120 satellites a month, the company said.
Amazon plans to launch two prototype Kuiper spacecraft on Vulcan’s long-delayed debut flight this year. New Glenn is expected to make its first flight in 2024 and Ariane 6 could launch by the end of the year, though one of Arianespace’s suppliers has said it expects a delay.