Amazon on Thursday announced plans to open a large new facility in the Seattle area to build a satellite for Project Kuiper, its planned satellite internet service.
The new, 172,000-square-foot satellite manufacturing facility in Kirkland, Washington will allow Amazon to manufacture four satellites per day, the company said. Serious production capacity will help Amazon reach its goal launch a constellation of 3,236 satellites to provide fast, affordable broadband to customers around the globe.
Amazon announced Project Kuiper in 2019 and already has a 219,000 square foot research and development facility in Washington, which is dedicated to the project.
“To realize our vision for the project, we needed to operate on a much larger scale,” the Amazon blog post said. “That requires dedicated production space.”
Amazon has designed and developed the Project Kuiper satellites in-house on its own, and the new manufacturing facility will give the company additional control over manufacturing and testing. “By centralizing operations here in Puget Sound, we were also able to ensure close coordination between the design and development teams in Redmond and the production teams in Kirkland,” Amazon said.
By early 2023, Amazon aims to send two prototype satellites into space with the help of United Launch Alliance (ULA). Along with ULA, Amazon has contracted with three other space launch companies — Arianespace, Blue Origin (the rocket company founded by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos), and ABL Space Systems — to put production satellites into production. into low-Earth orbit (LION).
The scale of Amazon’s plans demonstrates the rapid growth of the private space industry. As of January 1, 2022, only 4,852 active satellites in space, including 4,078 in LEO.
Washington State has had a strong aerospace industry for more than a century, and the new facility will create more than 200 high-skilled aerospace and manufacturing jobs in the Puget Sound area, Amazon said. .
Amazon currently has more than 1,000 people working in the Project Kuiper program. The company hopes its existing businesses and areas of expertise will give Project Kuiper some competitive advantage. For example, a broadband service could leverage Amazon’s global logistics and operations footprint for customer service, while Amazon Web Services would provide the network and infrastructure needed to service the facility. diverse, global customers.
So far, Amazon has not tapped SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocket company, to launch any of its satellites. Starlink, SpaceX’s broadband satellite service, already has thousands of satellites in orbit and hundreds of thousands of subscribers. However, SpaceX has committed to launching competing satellites into space
