Amazon to create headquarters for satellite-communications project

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This article was published 21/12/2019 (2139 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Amazon’s next new business may be in orbit, but first it will grow Washington’s commercial space industry. The company plans to launch a constellation of satellites to provide global broadband internet connectivity — and said this week that research, development and prototype manufacturing will be based in Redmond, Wash.

The Seattle technology and commerce giant faces a crowded field of satellite broadband competitors, including Boeing and Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which opened a Redmond office in 2015 for its Starlink project. SpaceX has put 120 broadband satellites into orbit this year.

By placing its “primary headquarters” for the satellite effort in Redmond, Amazon adds to the region’s substantial cluster of commercial space and satellite businesses, which include Aerojet Rocketdyne, Tethers Unlimited and Spaceflight Industries and its satellite service BlackSky.

“There’s a great deal of activity, and I’m seeing it grow quite a bit,” said Prof. Kristi Morgansen, chairwoman of the University of Washington’s department of aeronautics and astronautics.

“There’s everything from long-established companies through things that have been around about two weeks.”

She met recently with officials from that nascent company, which is planning to launch satellites that would service other orbiting satellites, she said, underscoring the anticipated growth. Starlink aims to have as many as 12,000 satellites in orbit, and Amazon could launch more than 3,200, according to regulatory filings.

The growth of commercial satellites promises improvements in communications and new applications in areas such as agriculture and disaster response, Morgansen said. But the proliferation of objects in orbit also presents challenges such as growing amounts of space debris and interference with astronomy.

Amid the current wave of commercial space endeavors, the satellite broadband business that Amazon and its competitors are pursuing is familiar in this region. Around the time Jeff Bezos founded Amazon in a Bellevue home in 1994, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and wireless-communications pioneer Craig McCaw were planning to pour billions of dollars into Teledesic, which sought to launch a constellation of satellites at the beginning of the internet boom.

“The vision was very similar to what you have today,” said Tim Farrar, a satellite-communications consultant and researcher who worked on the project.

Since then, he said, satellite-communications technology has advanced significantly. Satellites today are cheaper and can handle more data. There’s also a growing industry providing satellite launch services, including SpaceX and United Launch Alliance, a Boeing-Lockheed Martin joint venture. Bezos’s Kent, Wash.-based Blue Origin is expected to fly its New Glenn orbital rocket in 2021.

Farrar said a challenge for Amazon and its competitors is that ground-based broadband technology has advanced even further in the past two decades, calling into question the satellite-broadband business model, particularly as new, high-speed wireless connections such as 5G become available. In underserved and developing markets that satellite-broadband providers are targeting, cellular-network operators are already investing heavily and have a big lead, he said.

— Seattle Times