Monday April 28 from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida departed an Atlas V rocket of the United Launch Alliance (Lockheed Martin and Boeing) carrying atop 27 satellites at 7 P.M. EDT, after a rescheduled attempt on April 9 due to bad weather, after Amazon hoped it would send its first satellites into space in early 2024, for its Project Kuiper to deliver satellite internet globally in a $10 Billion effort unveiled in 2019.
On April 29, today Amazon CEO Andy Jassy confirmed Amazon’s “first 27 production satellites are operating as expected in low Earth orbit”, the first 27 of 1,618 satellites imposed as a deadline by mid 2026 by the Federal Communications Commission, since 2019 meanwhile Starlink has seen more than 8000 satellites put in orbit since the same year when Amazon first announced its project, 2019, Amazon however expects to start delivering service later this year.
On Monday Starlink achieved launch 250th with SpaceX‘s reusable Falcon 9 rocket.
To date, Starlink has more than 5 million Internet users across 125 countries.
ULA could perform 5 more Kuiper launches this year and despite facing established competition from Starlink Amazon Executives see its deep consumer expertise and Amazon cloud which will be connected to Kuiper as an advantage.
The satellite deployment rate for Starlink is currently one launch per week, each rocket with two dozen satellites.
Amazon Executive Chairman Jeff Bezos has said he has confidence Kuiper can compete with Starlink.
The devices to connect to its Kuiper internet satellite constellation come at just below $400 and the company expects to make tens of millions of antennas plus a smaller terminal.
