Amazon Builds IDR 1.7 Trillion Processing Facility At Kennedy Space Center For Kuiper Project
Amazon is building a $120 million processing facility at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida for thousands of Kuiper internet satellites to launch. This was revealed by the state company and officials on Friday, July 21.
The 100,000-foot-square building is part of the $ 10 billion (Rp149 trillion) fund Amazon promised to invest in the Kuiper project, a planned low-orbit satellite network of 3,200 satellites, designed to provide high-speed internet globally.
The Kuiper internet network, which will largely compete with SpaceX's Starlink led by Elon Musk, is expected to complement Amazon's growing web service business at this time.
Facilities in Florida will absorb 50 employees and become the last place for Kuiper satellites before they are delivered into space, after being produced at the main factory of the Kuiper project in Redmond, Washington. A ten-story high space will allow satellites to be installed in rocket payloads, namely satellite protections placed on rockets.
Amazon has started construction of the site in January and plans to complete it by the end of 2024. "Our target is to send the satellite's first batch to the facility for processing in the first half of 2025," said Steve Metayer, Amazon's vice president of Kuiper Production Operations.
Amazon hopes to launch its first mass satellites by early 2024, starting a sprint to deploy half of the network into orbit by 2026, in accordance with US regulatory requirements.
The company has secured 77 heavy rocket launch contracts, with a potential value of billions of dollars combined, mostly from a joint Boeing-Lockheed consortium, United Launch Alliance, and space company Jeff Bezos, Blue Origin.
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Amazon plans to launch some of its first satellite prototypes into space by the end of this year, followed by its first mass satellite launch in 2024.
Testing of services with corporate and government customers will begin that year too, the company said.
Anna Farrar, spokeswoman for Space Florida, a state-funded entity to withdraw a space business to Florida, said Amazon was entitled to receive state grants for transportation-related projects, but "has not received any funds to date."