“This launch marks step one towards the way forward for our partnership and elevated launch cadence,” Bruno mentioned. “We’ve been steadily modifying our launch amenities in Cape Canaveral to assist the capability for future Challenge Kuiper missions in a fashion that may finally profit each our industrial and authorities clients as we endeavor to avoid wasting lives, discover the universe, and join the world.”
The Atlas V rocket was powered by a Russian-made RD-180 predominant engine and 5 strap-on strong rocket boosters.
Credit score:
United Launch Alliance
Amazon floor controllers in Redmond, Washington, are overseeing the operation of the primary 27 Kuiper satellites. Engineers there’ll take a look at every satellite tv for pc’s capacity to independently maneuver and talk with mission management. Up to now, this seems to be going effectively.
The following step will contain activating the satellites’ electrical propulsion techniques to regularly climb to their assigned orbit of 392 miles (630 kilometers).
“Whereas the satellites full the orbit-raising course of, we are going to sit up for our final mission goal: offering end-to-end community connectivity,” Amazon mentioned in a press launch. “This entails sending knowledge from the Web, by our floor infrastructure, as much as the satellites, and all the way down to buyer terminal antennas, after which repeating the journey within the different path.”
A moveable deadline
Whereas many of the rockets Amazon will use for the Kuiper community have solely not too long ago entered service, that is not true of the Atlas V. Delays in spacecraft manufacturing at Amazon’s manufacturing unit close to Seattle saved the primary Kuiper satellites on the bottom till now.
An Amazon spokesperson informed Ars that the corporate is already delivery Kuiper satellites for the subsequent launch on an Atlas V rocket. Sources counsel that mission might raise off in June.
Amazon launched this picture of Kuiper consumer terminals in 2023.
Credit score:
Amazon
Amazon and its launch suppliers must get shifting. Kuiper officers face a July 2026 deadline from the Federal Communications Fee to deploy half of the fleet’s 3,236 satellites to take care of community authorization. This isn’t going to occur. It will require a median of almost one launch per week, beginning now.
The time restrict is movable, and the FCC has prolonged community authorization deadlines earlier than. Brendan Carr, the Trump-appointed chairman of the FCC, has argued for a extra “market-friendly regulatory surroundings” in a chapter he authored for the Heritage Basis’s Project 2025, extensively seen as a blueprint for the Trump administration’s methods.
However Carr is a detailed ally of Elon Musk, proprietor of Kuiper’s main competitor, Starlink.
Amazon just isn’t promoting subscriptions for Kuiper service but, and the corporate has mentioned its preliminary focus will likely be on testing Kuiper connectivity with “enterprise customers” earlier than shifting on to client broadband. Other than difficult Starlink, Kuiper may even compete in some market segments with Eutelsat OneWeb, the London-based operator of the one different lively Web megaconstellation.
OneWeb’s greater than 600 satellites present service to companies, governments, faculties, and hospitals quite than direct service to particular person customers.