WASHINGTON, July 21 (Reuters) - Amazon (AMZN.O) is building a $120 million processing facility at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida for its thousands of planned Kuiper internet satellites, the company and state officials said Friday. The Kuiper internet network, which will largely compete with Starlink from Elon Musk’s SpaceX, is expected to complement Amazon’s web services powerhouse. The Florida facility will employ 50 staff and be a last stop for Amazon's Kuiper satellites before they go to space, after being manufactured at the Kuiper project's primary plant in Redmond, Washington. The company has bagged 77 heavy-lift rocket launch contracts, potentially worth billions of dollars combined, mostly from the Boeing-Lockheed joint venture United Launch Alliance and Jeff Bezos's space company Blue Origin. Anna Farrar, a spokeswoman for Space Florida, a state-funded entity to attract space businesses to Florida, said Amazon is eligible to receive funds under a state grant for transportation-related projects but "has not received any funding to date."

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Persons: Steve Metayer, Jeff Bezos's, Anna Farrar, Joey Roulette, Deepa Babington Organizations: Kennedy Space Center, Amazon, Starlink, Elon Musk’s SpaceX, Kuiper Production, Boeing, Lockheed, United Launch Alliance, Origin, Space, Thomson Locations: Florida, Redmond , Washington, Space Florida