Amazon launched Project Kuiper at the end of last year with the goal of creating a constellation of more than 3,2 thousand satellites in low Earth orbit to provide Internet access to the population of remote and hard-to-reach regions of the planet.
On Wednesday, the company announced in a blog post that the project had entered its next phase. Amazon is currently renovating a leased facility in Redmond, Washington, "that will serve as Kuiper's headquarters for research and development, as well as its main satellite prototype manufacturing and testing facility."
The new state-of-the-art Amazon Kuiper complex will consist of two buildings with a total area of ββ219 square feet (000 thousand m20,3). It will include office and design space, research laboratories and production facilities for the production of prototype satellites. The project team is scheduled to move to Redmond next year.
The company also said that over the past few months, the Project Kuiper team has submitted applications to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and has also recruited a number of world-class experts to participate in the project.
The Amazon Kuiper project is by no means the only one of its kind. OneWeb already produces and launches its own satellites that provide Internet access. Also widely publicized is the initiative of SpaceX head Elon Musk, who plans to launch up to 42 thousand satellites into orbit over the next ten years.
Source: 3dnews.ru