NASA is increasingly looking to rely on private space
companies for its operations and wants to stimulate more commercial activity in
areas from space communications to sending humans to orbit.
Amazon's Project Kuiper, a planned network of over 3,000
satellites built to beam broadband internet to remote regions, won $67 million,
while SpaceX's Starlink venture, a larger satellite-internet network with some
2,000 satellites in space already, received $70 million.
NASA uses its current system, called the Tracking and Data
Relay Satellite network, to communicate with spacecraft in orbit, such as
SpaceX's Crew Dragon capsule when it ferries astronauts to and from the
International Space Station.
"The goal here is really to get industry to kick in
with us and develop these capabilities for customers that are not just NASA,
but other space-based customers as well, hopefully bringing down our
costs," Eli Naffah, the head of NASA's Communications Services Project,
told Reuters.
Each company is expected to complete development and
demonstrations of their satellites under the contract by 2025, NASA said in a
statement.
The other awardees include Inmarsat, SES, Telesat and
ViaSat. Competition is fierce primarily among Elon Musk's SpaceX, Amazon and
Telesat to provide broadband internet from space, a costly commercial endeavor
that could generate billions in revenue once fully operational, analysts say.
Starlink, while not yet completed, has thousands of
customers in various countries. Amazon, further behind, aims to launch its
first two prototype satellites in late 2022. © Reuters
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