2023-07-21 17:37:36
Amazon will invest 120 million dollars (nearly 108 million euros) to build a satellite assembly plant which will be installed at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the group announced on Friday.
This new equipment should allow the online sales giant to compete with SpaceX and its constellation of satellites, Starlink, with its own constellation of more than 3,200 satellites in low orbit, called “Kuiper project”.
This constellation will “provide fast and low-cost internet access to populations who do not have it everywhere in the world”, the group said in its press release.
“We have an ambitious plan to start full-scale production of the Kuiper project and conduct the first customer trials as early as next year, this plant will be a big part of it,” Kuiper vice president of production operations Steve Metayer said in the statement.
The group already has another site in Kirkland, Washington (northwest), where production will be launched at the end of the year.
The satellites will then be transported to Florida for final adjustments before being placed in low orbit using launchers from Blue Origin, also founded by Jeff Bezos, and the United Launch Alliance (ULA).
SpaceX, founded by Elon Musk, began deploying its constellation of more than 3,700 Starlink satellites in 2019 and is currently, by far, the main player in this market, in which OneWeb, a British operator, is trying to compete.
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