Amazon<\/b> is ramping up activity on its Project Kuiper constellation, acquiring a new 172,000-square-foot facility in Washington state for satellite production. <\/p>\n
The company is moving into the second phase of manufacturing Kuiper, preparing to manufacture one to three satellites each day \u2014 or more, said David Limp, senior vice president of Devices and Services at Amazon. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe have to build manufacturing capabilities that look more like consumer electronics or automobiles and less like the traditional space industry,\u201d Limp said, speaking Thursday in Washington Post Live interview with Post reporter Christian Davenport. <\/p>\n
The new facility in Kirkland, Washington, is in addition to an initial 219,000-square-foot research and development facility announced in 2020. It will support Amazon\u2019s plans for the 3,236-satellite constellation.<\/p>\n
Limp emphasized that Amazon\u2019s scale across cloud infrastructure and manufacturing will make Project Kuiper a success, despite the fact that it will compete with OneWeb and SpaceX\u2019s Starlink constellations, which have hundreds and thousands of satellites already in orbit, respectively. He said Amazon will have to invest billions of dollars of capital before Kuiper sees material cash flow, and Amazon\u2019s scale makes it one of the only companies that can tackle the issue of global broadband. <\/p>\n
Limp said Amazon can build a much lower cost and efficient user terminal, and the current cost is under $400 for the bill of materials. <\/p>\n
\u201cThe advantage to us was to be able to build a much lower cost, more efficient antenna,\u201d Limp said. \u201cWe\u2019re going to be building tens of millions of those. There\u2019s 3,236 satellites, but there\u2019s tens of millions of the things that go into people\u2019s homes. By bringing that price down \u2026 that\u2019s a big advantage for our architecture.\u201d <\/p>\n
He believes there are \u201chundreds and hundreds of millions\u201d of potential customers for an affordable, global constellation, despite competition.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere are hundreds of millions of customers around the world that don\u2019t have access to great broadband. Each of these constellations \u2026 they are going to have a limited amount of bandwidth,\u201d Limp said. \u201cIt\u2019s a lot of bandwidth, but it is a limited amount of bandwidth. I think there\u2019s plenty of room for two great constellations.\u201d <\/p>\n
Amazon has been relatively tight-lipped about Kuiper plans, but is starting to share more details after unveiling an initial antenna design in December 2020. Amazon said in Thursday blog post about the new facility that the company has more than 1,000 people working on the project across the U.S. including in San Diego, Austin, New York City, and Washington, D.C.<\/p>\n
The first two prototype satellites are set to launch in early 2023 on United Launch Alliance\u2019s (ULA) Vulcan Centaur rocket, and Amazon has secured up to 92 heavy-lift launches from Arianespace, Blue Origin, and ULA to launch the constellation. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe didn\u2019t greenlight our launch contracts, which were billions of dollars, until we had a satellite on a bench that seemed to be working and we had an antenna that seemed to be working,\u201d Limp said. \u201cI\u2019ve never been more optimistic, because now you\u2019re starting to see silicon light up, you\u2019re starting to see the functionality light up, you\u2019re starting to see manufacturing happening. That gives you more confidence that you\u2019re on path to deliver the system.\u201d<\/p>\n
Limp also confirmed Amazon is \u201copen\u201d to talking with SpaceX about launching Kuiper satellites. The Falcon 9 rocket is on the \u201clow end of capacity\u201d needed for Kuiper launches, he said, but Falcon Heavy and Starship are \u201cvery viable candidates.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Amazon is ramping up activity on its Project Kuiper constellation, acquiring a new 172,000-square-foot facility in Washington state for satellite production. The company is moving into the second phase of manufacturing Kuiper, preparing to manufacture one to three satellites each day \u2014 or more, said David Limp, senior vice president of Devices and Services at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":54034,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-54492","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54492"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=54492"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54492\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/54034"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54492"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54492"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54492"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}