Amazon’s $120M Facility to Boost NASA’s Space Center

Amazon is building a $120 million (nearly Rs. 980 crore) processing facility at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida for its thousands of planned Kuiper internet satellites, the company and state officials said Friday.

The 1,00,000 square-foot building is part of the roughly $10 billion (nearly Rs. 82,000 crore) that Amazon has vowed to invest in its Kuiper project, a planned network of 3,200 low Earth-orbiting satellites designed to beam broadband internet globally.

The Kuiper internet network, which will largely compete with Starlink from Elon Musk’s SpaceX, is expected to complement 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-story-tall room will allow the satellites to be fitted into rocket payload farings, the protective shell around satellites that sit atop the rocket.

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

That target date will kickoff a sprint for Amazon to deploy half of the network into orbit by 2026, as required by US regulators.