U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell, blue jacket with scissors, cuts the ribbon this morning for Amazon’s new Project Kuiper satellite manufacturing facility in Kirkland.
Amazon is accelerating satellite production and testing at a new manufacturing facility in Kirkland ahead of the first full-scale satellite launch for Project Kuiper later this year, the company announced today during an onsite event featuring company, government, and education representatives.
The 172,000-square-foot facility — which opened in April and will have capacity to make up to five satellites per day, or about 1,000 per year — serves as the manufacturing hub for the satellites that will form Project Kuiper’s low Earth orbit constellation, or LEO, to provide global broadband connection to the internet, including for tens of millions of people in areas currently unserved or underserved. The satellites work in concert with ground-based terminals.
“We like to say we’re the Silicon Valley of space here in Puget Sound — and Kirkland now is joining the fight, helping us deliver not just better service, but a skilled workforce and great attention to how the United States is going to be very competitive in space communication,” said U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell, one of five speakers at a ribbon-cutting event this morning marking the facility’s recent opening and ramp-up.
U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell delivers remarks before the ribbon-cutting
The Kirkland facility — part of a growing Eastside space-industry sector — represents a major investment in cutting-edge aerospace manufacturing capabilities and job opportunities for Washingtonians and will play an important part in Project Kuiper’s mission to connect customers around the globe, Amazon said in a blog post today. Amazon had to completely remake the facility, a former warehouse, to meet the needs for the sophisticated job of satellite manufacturing.
Space already is big business in Washington — a roughly $70 billion industry that supports 250,000 jobs and includes about 100 companies, many clustered in Puget Sound, including longtime stalwart Aerojet Rocketdyne, an L3Harris Technologies, Cantwell said.
Amazon has hired more than 120 employees to operate the satellite factory — more than halfway toward its goal of creating 200 high-skilled manufacturing jobs. Amazon already has about 2,000 employees working on Project Kuiper, most of them at its R & D facility in Redmond, with others spread around the country. Amazon got its Federal Communications Commission license for 3,236 LEO satellites in 2020 and has been building toward this production moment since then.
The first batch of satellites, the size of which were not disclosed, is targeted for launch in the fourth quarter this year. The first satellites will launch in Florida on an Atlas V rocket from United Launch Alliance, with other rocket companies also planning to launch satellites. Project Kuiper will continue to increase satellite production and deployment heading into 2025 with plans to begin offering service to customers next year, the company’s blog post said.
Amy Morrison, president of Lake Washington Institute of Technology, talks about the education partnership between Amazon and LWIT to help train students for Project Kuiper’s advanced manufacturing jobs.
To help meet demand for the specialized manufacturing workforce needed to build the satellites, Amazon partnered with Kirkland-based Lake Washington Institute of Technology, about a mile away from the satellite facility, to develop a new satellite manufacturing certification program to cultivate a local talent pipeline.
Lake Washington Institute of Technology is offering two new state-approved certificates in aerospace assembly, and aerospace manufacturing proficiency. The certificates will be offered starting this summer quarter, which begins July 8, and will focus on safety protocols, aerospace assembly skills, electrical systems, and emerging technologies.
“Those certificates can be completed in just one quarter, so students can come right to work just around the corner from the college,” said the school’s president Amy Morrison, who was one of today’s speakers.
Amazon donated tools to the school that are the same as those used in the satellite facility, Morrison said, thanking the company for supporting education and creating jobs for students.
“Project Kuiper is creating an entirely new category of advanced manufacturing in Amazon’s home state and our partnership with the Lake Washington Institute of Technology is a key step in creating that workforce” necessary for future space-communications jobs, said another speaker, Brian Huseman, vice president of public policy and community engagement at Amazon.
Brian Huseman, vice president of public policy and community engagement at Amazon, left, and Steve Metayer, vice president of production operations at Project Kuiper, meet with media after this morning’s ribbon-cutting. Each also delivered remarks during today’s event.
The satellites have a seven-year service life, so even after the 3,200-plus are made and launched over the coming years, old ones will be deorbited and replaced with new ones to maintain the full constellation, “so this facility here will operate for decades,” Steve Metayer, vice president of production operations at Project Kuiper, said in an interview after the event.
Project Kuiper, first announced in early 2019, will provide low-latency, high-speed broadband connectivity to unserved and underserved communities around the world. Kuiper Systems LLC is a wholly owned subsidiary of Amazon.com Services.
Scaling satellite production
The Kirkland facility includes custom equipment required to manufacture and test space-grade hardware, including liquid nitrogen tanks that help quickly cool test chambers to temperatures found in space, and robotic arms that help test and calibrate the advanced communications payload onboard each spacecraft. Most of the facility is a clean space requiring special attire to protect sensitive electronics from electrostatic discharge, Amazon described in its blog.
An employee works on solar array assembly at Project Kuiper.
Satellite materials arrive in Kirkland after a stop at Project Kuiper’s new logistics facility in Everett. With Project Kuiper’s R & D facility in Redmond, there’s close collaboration between design, manufacturing, and production teams to support rapid iteration on satellite design. A core group of Project Kuiper engineers sits at the factory for real-time collaboration and troubleshooting, the blog said.
Metayer — whose team is responsible for building, shipping, and processing the satellites, working with launch partners to launch and deploy the satellites, and installing the ground stations and infrastructure needed on Earth to communicate to the constellation in space — said in remarks at today’s event that traditional communication satellites typically take years to build, but Amazon wants to deliver service to customers as soon as possible.
“That means we need to be able to build, test, and ship, and launch satellites at a much, much faster rate than it’s been done before,” Metayer said. “This entire facility is designed with that mission in mind. It is custom-built to support high-rate satellite production, and gives us a capability to build up to five satellites per day, peak capacity.”
An employee works on part qualification at Project Kuiper.
To produce up to five satellites daily, the team invented more efficient ways to test hardware without compromising the reliability and safety of spacecraft, Amazon’s blog said, noting the innovative testing process at Kirkland has reduced the test time from months to days for individual satellites.
“These are some of the most advanced communication satellites ever built, and we want to ensure that every Project Kuiper spacecraft we launch meets our standards for performance, reliability, and safety,” Metayer said. “Building one or two is incredibly complex, building four or five a day, exponentially hard, but the team is making incredible progress. … We’re building and testing flight hardware at this facility as we speak.”
Kirkland Mayor Kelli Curtis
Kirkland Mayor Kelli Curtis referenced the city’s early history for shipbuilding on Lake Washington, noting its new manufacturing role today.
“Before, Kirkland was a hub of manufacturing for our regional maritime economy, and now Amazon’s partnership with Project Kuiper ensures Kirkland’s place is the future of our space economy,” Curtis said.