Amazon Constructs $120 Million Processing Facility at NASA

Amazon is constructing a US$120 million processing facility for its thousands of planned Kuiper internet satellites at NASA's Kennedy Space Centre in Florida, the company and state officials announced on July 21.

The 100,000-square-foot structure is part of Amazon's pledge to invest roughly US$10 billion in its Kuiper project, a network of 3,200 low-Earth-orbiting satellites designed to beam broadband internet globally.

The Kuiper internet network, which will primarily compete with Elon Musk's SpaceX's Starlink, is expected to supplement Amazon's web services powerhouse.

The Florida facility will employ 50 staff and be a last stop for Amazon's Kuiper satellites before they go to space, after being manufactured at the Kuiper project's primary plant in Redmond, Washington. A ten-storey-tall room will allow the satellites to be fitted into rocket payload farings, the protective shell around satellites that sit atop the rocket.

According to Steve Metayer, Amazon's vice president of Kuiper Production Operations, Amazon began construction of the site in January and plans to complete it by late 2024, with a target of shipping its first batch of satellites to the area for processing in the second half of 2025.

This deadline will kickstart Amazon's race to get half of the network into orbit by 2026, as required by US regulators.

The company has received 77 heavy-lift rocket launch contracts totaling billions of dollars, the majority of which came from the Boeing-Lockheed joint venture United Launch Alliance and Jeff Bezos' space company Blue Origin.