The battle of billionaires in space between Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk is ready to enter a new arena: satellite internet.
Amazon, the company that Mr. Bezos started as an online bookseller three decades ago, is now a merchandising behemoth, the owner of the James Bond franchise, a seller of electronic gadgets like Echo smart speakers and one of the most powerful providers of cloud computing.
So perhaps it is not a surprise that Amazon is now launching the first few of thousands of satellites known as Project Kuiper to provide another option for remaining connected in the modern world. The market for beaming high-speed internet to the ground from orbit is currently dominated by Elon Musk’s SpaceX rocket company, which operates a similar service, Starlink. Starlink, with thousands of satellites in orbit and more launching nearly every week, already serves several million customers around the world.
On Monday, the company first 27 satellites were shipped to space. Their journey to their final orbits continues.
Amazon had no immediate comment after the launch. It will take many hours, if not days, for the company to commission and establish contact with all 27 satellites and know if they are operational.
When the launch and how can I watch it?
The satellite lifted off on Monday at 7:01 p.m. Eastern time from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. They were carried by an Atlas V, a rocket made by United Launch Alliance, a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin.
The spacecraft will later in the evening deploy the Kuiper satellites in a circular orbit at 280 miles above the surface. The satellites’ propulsion system will then gradually raise that orbit to an altitude of 393 miles.
What is Project Kuiper?
Project Kuiper will be a constellation of internet satellites intended to provide high-speed data connections to almost every point on Earth. Doing this successfully will require thousands of satellites, and Amazon’s goal is to operate more than 3,200 in the years to come.
The company will compete with SpaceX’s Starlink, a service that was originally marketed primarily to residential customers.
While Kuiper also aims for that market, particularly in remote areas, it will also be integrated with Amazon Web Services, the company’s cloud computing offering, which is popular with large corporations and governments around the world. That might make it more attractive to businesses that involve satellite imagery or weather forecasting that not only need to move large amounts of data across the internet, but also to perform calculations on the data.
Ground stations will connect the Kuiper satellites to the web services infrastructure in a manner that could also allow companies to communicate with their own remote equipment. For example, Amazon has suggested that energy companies could use Kuiper to monitor and control remote wind farms or offshore drilling platforms.
In October 2023, two prototype Kuiper satellites were launched to test the technology. Amazon said that the tests were successful. Those prototypes were never meant to serve in the operational constellation, and after seven months they were nudged back into the atmosphere, where they burned up. The company said it has since updated the designs of “every system and subsystem on board.”
“There’s a big difference between launching two satellites and launching 3,000 satellites,” said Rajeev Badyal, an Amazon executive in charge of Kuiper, in a promotional video ahead of the launch.
When will Amazon provide internet service from space?
Amazon told the Federal Communications Commission in 2020 that service would begin after it had deployed its first 578 satellites. The company has said that it expects to connect customers to the internet later this year.
While a fully functional constellation needs thousands of satellites, the company can offer service in specific regions with far fewer in orbit before expanding to more global coverage later on.
The F.C.C.’s approval of the constellation came with a requirement that at least half the satellites needed to be deployed by July 30, 2026. Industry analysts say the company could get an extension if it has demonstrated substantial progress by then.
Getting the satellites into orbit also depends on rocket launches occurring on schedule, which can be a problem if enough rockets are not available. Amazon also needs to build hundreds of ground stations, to relay their signals to users.
Is space too crowded for both SpaceX and Amazon?
In 2000, there were fewer than 1,000 satellites in Earth orbit.
Today, SpaceX alone operates more than 7,000 Starlink satellites, and it hopes to increase that total to 42,000.
Other megaconstellations, including Project Kuiper, could multiply the number of satellites in the region called low-Earth orbit by several times, and will require careful orbital traffic control to avoid colliding with each other or with other debris in low Earth orbit.
But satellites like Kuiper and Starlink do not stay in low Earth orbit indefinitely. At the end of their service life, they are intentionally removed from orbit to burn up in the atmosphere. Even if they fail completely, air resistance alone will pull them to their destruction within a few years so they will not add to the long-term clutter of space.
What other rockets will launch Kuiper to orbit?
In April 2022, Amazon announced that it was purchasing up to 83 launches carrying Kuiper satellites, on a series of rockets. Some would fly on New Glenn, a powerful, voluminous rocket made by Jeff Bezos’ spaceflight company, Blue Origin. Others would lift off on a Vulcan, a new rocket from United Launch Alliance. Other batches will travel on the Ariane 6 from Arianespace, a European rocket company.
These three vehicles are new, and have only been launched a handful of times.
In December 2023, Amazon also purchased three Falcon 9 launches for 2025 from SpaceX, its direct competitor for Kuiper. That decision was made months after a pension fund sued Amazon, saying that the company’s board of trustees had acted in bad faith in arranging almost all of the Kuiper launches on the unproven rockets while ignoring the Falcon 9, which is the dominant rocket in modern spaceflight and likely to be the less expensive one.