Amazon is building a $120 million facility at the Kennedy Space Center, on Florida's Cape Canaveral, where it'll prepare Project Kuiper internet-relaying satellites for launch.at Space Florida's Launch and Landing Facility, will employ 50 workers, span 100,000 square feet, and feature a 100-foot-tall clean room to load the hardware into specialized dispensers, developed by Beyond Gravity, before they're carried up into low earth orbit .
Amazon's $120 million satellite processing facility under construction at the Kennedy Space Center will provide a staging area for Kuiper bird launches ... Source: Amazon. Click to enlarge In all, Amazon plans to loft 3,200 satellites into LEO, where they'll compete with Elon Musk's Starlink constellation to beam broadband internet to under-served subscribers around the globe, and hopefully not further inconvenience astronomers.
Amazon says it will launch two prototypes"in the coming months" and has secured 77 launches with the United Launch Alliance , Blue Origin, and others. Blue Origin being the rocket biz set up by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, natch. However, the two rockets highlighted in the release — the Blue Origin New Glenn and ULA's Vulcan Centaur — haven't actually made it off the ground yet.
The web giant hasn't started volume satellite production at its Kirkland, Washington facility yet either. According to the