The battle of billionaires in the space between Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk has entered a new arena: satellite internet.
Amazon, the company that Bezos has started as online bookshop three decades ago, is now a merchandising behemoth, the owner of the James Bond franchise, an electronic gadget seller such as Echo Smart Speaker and one of the most powerful cloud computing suppliers.
So perhaps it is not a surprise that Amazon has now launched the first thousand satellites known as Project Kuiper to provide another option to remain connected in the modern world. The market to transmit high -speed internet on the ground from the orbit is currently dominated by Elon Musk's Spacex Rocket Company, which manages a similar service, Starlink. Starlink, with thousands of satellites in orbit and more by launching almost every week, you already need several million customers all over the world.
On Monday evening, the first 27 satellites of the company were sent to space and unfolded in orbit.
Amazon had no immediate comments after the launch. It will take many hours, if not days, so that the company commissioned and establishes contacts with all 27 satellites and knows if they are operational.
When was the launch?
The satellite got up on Monday at 19:01 now oriental from the Cape Canavera Space Force station in Florida. They were transported by an Atlas V, a rocket made by United Launch Alliance, a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin.
The space vehicle deployed the Kuiper satellites in a circular orbit 280 miles above the surface. The satellite propulsion system will gradually increase that orbit at an altitude of 393 miles.
“This launch marks the first step towards the future of our partnership and an increase in the launch cadence,” said Tory Bruno, CEO of United Launch Alliance, in a note.
What is the Kuiper project?
Project Kuiper will be a constellation of Internet satellites intended to provide high -speed data connections at almost all points of the earth. Do 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 originally commercially marketed mainly with residential customers.
While Kuiper also aims at that market, in particular in remote areas, the company's cloud computing offer will also be integrated with Amazon Web Services, which is popular among large companies and governments around the world. This could make it more attractive to companies involving satellite images or weather forecasts that not only have to move large quantities of data on the Internet, but also to perform calculations on the data.
The earth stations will connect the Kuiper satellites to the web service infrastructure in order to also allow companies to communicate with their remote equipment. For example, Amazon suggested that energy companies could use Kuiper to monitor and control remote wind farms or offshore drilling platforms.
In October 2023 two Kuiper prototype satellites were launched to test technology. Amazon said the tests were successful. Those prototypes never had to serve in the operational constellation and after seven months they were pushed into the atmosphere, where they burned. The company said that it has updated the projects of “every system and subsystem on board”.
“There is a big difference between the launch of two satellites and the launch of 3,000 satellites,” said Rajeev Badyal, an Amazon manager responsible for Kuiper, in a promotional video before launch.
When will Amazon provide internet service from space?
Amazon told the Federal Communications Commission in 2020 that the service would start after deploying his first 578 satellites. The company said that it plans to connect customers to the Internet by the end of the year.
While a fully functional constellation needs thousands of satellites, the company can offer a service in specific regions with much less in orbit before expanding in a more global cover later.
The approval of the CCC of the constellation was provided with the requirement that at least half of the satellites had to be distributed by 30 July 2026. Analysts in the sector affirm that the company could obtain an extension if it had shown substantial progress since then.
Putting the satellites in orbit also depends on rockets that occur in the scheduled times, which can be a problem if there are not enough rockets available. Amazon must also build hundreds of earth stations, to transmit their signals to users.
Is the space too crowded for both Spacex and Amazon?
In 2000, there were less than 1,000 satellites in Earth's orbit.
Today, Spacex alone manages more than 7000 Starlink satellites and hopes to increase that total to 42,000.
Other megachestellations, including the Kuiper project, could multiply the number of satellites in the region called orbits at low land several times and will require careful control of orbital traffic to avoid colliding with each other or with other debris in low earth orbit.
But satellites like Kuiper and Starlink do not remain in orbit with low land indefinitely. At the end of their service duration, they are intentionally removed from the orbit to burn in the atmosphere. Even if they completely fail, the air resistance alone will pull them to their destruction within a few years, so they will not be added to the long -term disorder of the space.
What other rockets will launch Kuiper in orbit?
In April 2022, Amazon announced that he was buying up to 83 launches that transported Kuiper satellites, on a series of rockets. Some fly on New Glenn, a powerful voluminous rocket made by Jeff Bezos' Spaceflight Company, Blue Origin. Others are raised on a volcan, a new rocket of the United Launch Alliance. Other lots will travel on Ariane 6 from Arianespace, a company in European missiles.
These three vehicles are new and only a handful of times have been launched.
In December 2023, Amazon also bought three Falcon 9 launches for 2025 from Spacex, his direct competitor for Kuiper. This decision was made months after a pension fund sued Amazon, stating that the company's foundation council had acted in bad faith in the organization of almost all Kuiper launches on unknown rockets by ignoring the Falcon 9, which is the dominant rocket in modern spatial flight and will probably be the least expensive one.