Amazon connected Thursday announced plans to unfastened a monolithic caller facility successful the Seattle country to physique satellites for Project Kuiper, its planned outer net service.
The new, 172,000-square-foot outer accumulation installation successful Kirkland, Washington volition let Amazon to nutrient arsenic galore arsenic 4 satellites per day, the institution said. The superior accumulation capableness volition assistance Amazon scope its extremity of launching a constellation of 3,236 satellites to supply fast, affordable broadband to customers globally.
Amazon announced Project Kuiper successful 2019 and already has 1 219,000-square-foot probe and improvement facility successful Washington that's dedicated to the project.
"To present connected our imaginativeness for the project, we request to run connected a overmuch larger scale," Amazon's blog station said. "That requires dedicated manufacturing space."
Amazon designed and developed its ain Project Kuiper satellites in-house, and the caller manufacturing installation volition springiness the institution further power implicit the accumulation and investigating process. "By centralizing operations present successful the Puget Sound, we tin besides guarantee adjacent coordination betwixt plan and improvement teams successful Redmond and manufacturing teams successful Kirkland," Amazon said.
By aboriginal 2023, Amazon aims to send 2 prototype satellites into space with the assistance of the institution United Launch Alliance (ULA). Along with ULA, Amazon already has contracts signed with 3 different space-launch companies -- Arianespace, Blue Origin (the rocket institution started by Amazon laminitis Jeff Bezos) and ABL Space Systems -- to present its accumulation satellites into low-Earth orbit (LEO).
The standard of Amazon's plans show the swift maturation of the backstage abstraction industry. As of Jan. 1, 2022, determination were lone 4,852 operating satellites successful space, including 4,078 successful LEO.
Washington authorities has had a robust aerospace manufacture for much than a century, and the caller installation should make much than 200 highly skilled aerospace and manufacturing jobs successful the Puget Sound region, Amazon said.
Amazon presently has much than 1,000 radical moving connected the Project Kuiper program. The institution expects its existing concern operations and areas of expertise to springiness Project Kuiper immoderate competitory advantages. For instance, the broadband work could leverage Amazon's planetary logistics and operations footprint for lawsuit service, portion Amazon Web Services volition supply the networking and infrastructure indispensable to service a diverse, planetary lawsuit base.
So far, Amazon hasn't tapped SpaceX, Elon Musk's rocket company, to motorboat immoderate of its satellites. Starlink, SpaceX's broadband outer service, already has thousands of satellites successful orbit and hundreds of thousands of subscribers. Still, SpaceX has committed to launching competing satellites into space
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