Two new players on the Space Coast — OneWeb and Blue Origin — are teaming up to build and launch satellites in Central Florida, reinforcing the foothold that private space flight is gaining in the region.
OneWeb founder Greg Wyler announced Wednesday that the company has contracted for five launches of its satellites on Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket, which is under development and will be built in Brevard County.
Local manufacturing of satellites and rockets has been historically scarce in Florida. Plenty of contractors provide support, services, parts and engineering, but Cape Canaveral hasn’t been known for large-scale manufacturing. The two companies are both planning to start hiring soon, for a total of 550 people.
“We will be busy making satellites in Florida,” Wyler tweeted Wednesday and tagged Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos. Bezos, also the founder of Amazon, tweeted a photo of himself shaking hands with Wyler.
Blue Origin and OneWeb are building large new manufacturing plants across the street from each other at Space Florida’s Exploration Park, on the doorstep of Kennedy Space Center.
High-tech manufacturing like that should provide a lot more training and career opportunities, said Jaydeep Mukherjee, director of the Florida Space Grant Consortium in Orlando.
“It’s a great announcement, because I believe it would be the first time a satellite is built here and launched here on a rocket built here,” Mukherjee said. “In the distant past, this area was known primarily as a launch site, but that has gradually changed. Going to the moon sounds nice, but this announcement is very real and can happen in a few years.”
OneWeb has deep pockets, with $1.2 billion in funding from SoftBank that included a merger with Intelsat, and it hopes to launch as many as 2,000 satellites in the years to come. Mukherjee said there are plenty of local space companies, but most are still NASA contractors.
“This is a real foundation for more companies coming here, a real cluster that we haven’t seen since the shuttle program,” Mukherjee said of the OneWeb-Blue Origin announcement.
Confidence in OneWeb has increased because of the Intelsat merger, said Carol Craig, CEO of Cape Canaveral-based Craig Technologies, an aerospace and defense contractor that provides services such as software design, training and simulation and manufacturing of custom avionics and mechanical components. Craig’s company employs 400 people.
She said OneWeb and Blue Origin will likely use contractors from other states, but she agreed that such large-scale private-industry manufacturing, on the payload side as well as the rocket, is unique.
“We’re even talking to Blue Origin; we have been for the last two or three years. At events like the international space symposium, we make sure we connect with them,” Craig said.
OneWeb’s deal with Blue Origin was unveiled at a satellite conference in Washington, D.C., a day after Blue Origin announced its first paying contract, with satellite company Eutelsat to launch in 2020. Previously, OneWeb said launches would be with Virgin Galactic and Arianespace.
Space Florida, the state’s economic development and marketing agency for the space industry, is set to vote Friday on taking out a new loan of $17.5 million to fund construction of OneWeb’s plant. Space Florida is planning to build the 100,000-square-foot factory for OneWeb and lease it to the company. A lease with an initial term of 30 years is also on the March 10 agenda for the agency.
The general contractor on the project has been identified as Hensel Phelps. Space Florida is also set to consider a separate contract involving construction of the assembly lines, with France-based Latecoere Services, totaling $8.8 million.
A March 3 groundbreaking for OneWeb’s Spacecraft Integration Processing Facility at Exploration Park has not been rescheduled since its postponement.
OneWeb has committed to investing more $80 million in new construction, equipment and tooling on the site, and to creating 250 jobs by the end of 2020, with annual average wages of $85,000, plus benefits.
“These would be big new players in the private sector, and we plan to talk to them soon about internship chances,” Mukherjee said. He said the consortium, which is housed at University of Central Florida, has already been aiming to send student experiments up on Blue Origin’s suborbital rockets, which launch from Texas.
pbrinkmann@orlandosentinel.com or 407-420-5660; Twitter, @PaulBrinkmann
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