OneWeb Ltd, a privately owned startup bankrolled by Richard Branson’s Virgin Group and other well-known firms, will build a factory to mass produce small satellites near NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, two sources involved in the project told Reuters.
OneWeb plans an initial production run of 900 satellites to provide global, high-speed Internet access as early as 2019. The multibillion-dollar network would be more than 10 times larger than any previous satellite constellation.