The battle of billionaires in the space between Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk has entered a new sand: satellite internet.
Amazon, the company that Mr. Bezos began as a bookseller online three decades ago, now a merchandising giant, the owner of the James Bond franchise, a seller of electronic devices such as Echo Smart Speakers and one of the most powerful suppliers of cloud computing.
So, it may not be a surprise that Amazon has launched the first thoughts or satellites known as Project Kuiper to provide another option for a connected remoteization in the modern world. Beander’s high speed Internet market to the orbit is currently dominated by Spacex Rocket Company by Elon Musk, which operates a similar service, Starlink. Starlink, with thousands of satellites in orbit and more launch almost every week, already serves several million customers worldwide.
On Monday night, the company’s first 27 satellites were sent to space and deployed in orbit.
Amazon did not have immediate comments after the launch. It will take many hours, if not days, for the company to commission and establish contact with the 27 satellites and know if they are operational.
When was the launch?
The satellite got up on Monday at 7:01 pm, east time of the Capeaveral Cape Speed Station in Florida. They were transported by an Atlas V, a rocket made by United Launch Alliance, a joint company between Boeing and Lockheed Martin.
The spacecraft deployed the Kuiper satellites in a circular orbit at 280 miles above the surface. The satellite propulsion system will gradually elevate that orbit at an altitude of 393 miles.
“This launch marks the first step towards the future of our association and the increase in launching cadence,” said Tory Bruno, executive director of United Launch Alliance, in a statement.
What is Project Kuiper?
Project Kuiper will be a constellation of Internet satellites aimed at providing high -speed data connections to almost all points of the earth. Doing this successful will require thousands of satellites, and Amazon’s goal is to operate more than 3,200 in the coming years.
The company will compete with Spacex Starlink, a service that was originally marketed mainly to residential customers.
Although Kuiper also points to that market, particularly in remote areas, it will also be integrated with Amazon web services, the company’s cloud computing offer, which is popular among large corporations and governments around the world. That could make it more attractive to companies that involve satellite or prognostic images of time that not only need to move large amounts of the Internet, but also to carry out calculations in the data.
Terrestrial stations will connect Kuiper satellites with web services infrastructure in a way 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 drilling platforms on the high seas.
In October 2023, two Kuiper prototype satellites were launched to test technology. Amazon said the tests were successful. These prototypes were never meaning to serve in the operational constellation, and after seven months they were pushed back to the atmosphere, where they burned. The company said that since then it has updated the designs of “all systems and subsystem on board.”
“There is a big difference between the launch of two satellites and the launch of 3,000 satellites,” said Rajev Badyal, a Amazon executive by Kuiper, in a promotional video before launch.
When will Amazon provide the Internet service from space?
Amazon told the Federal Communications Commission in 2020 that the service would begin after its first 578 satellites had deployed. The company has said it hopes to connect customers to the Internet at the end of this year.
While a fully functional constellation needs and is one of the satellites, the company can offer service in specific regions with FAR Feer in orbit before expanding to a more global coverage later.
The FCC constellation approach was required with the requirement that at least half of the satellites should be implemented before July 30, 2026. Industry analysts say that the company could an extension if it has demonstrated substantial progress by then.
Bringing satellites in orbit also depends on rocket launches that occur in time, which can be a problem if there are not enough available rockets. Amazon also needs to build hundreds of land stations, to transmit your signals to users.
Is the space too full for Spacex and Amazon?
In 2000, there were less than 1,000 satellites in the earth’s orbit.
Today, Spacex alone operates more than 7000 Starlink satellites, and hopes to increase that total to 42,000.
Other megaconstellations, including the Kuiper project, could multiply the number of satellites in the region called low land orbit for several times, and will require careful orbital traffic control to avoid colliding with Othher or with.
But satellites like Kuiper and Starlink do not remain in orbit of low land indefinitely. At the end of their useful life, they are intentionally eliminated from the orbit to burn in the atmosphere. Even if they fail completely, air resistance will lead them to their destruction in a few years so that they will not add to the long -term disorder of space.
What other rockets will launch Kuiper to Orbit?
In April 2022, Amazon announced that he was buying up to 83 launches with Kuiper satellites, in a series of rockets. Some would fly in New Glenn, a powerful and bulky rocket made by Jeff Bezos’s space flight company, Blue Origin. Others would take off in a vulcan, a new United Launch Alliance rocket. Other lots will travel to Ariane 6 from Arianespace, a European rocket company.
These three vehicles are new and have only launched a handful of times.
In December 2023, Amazon also bought three Falcon 9 launches for 2025 from Spacex, its direct competitor for Kiper. That decision was made months after a pension fund sued Amazon, saying that the company’s trustee board had acted in bad faith in organizing almost all Kuiper launches in the rockets not tested while ignoring Falcon 9, which Domant Biss in the modern rocket in the modern rocket.
