Amazon’s second huge batch of web satellites has taken flight.
A United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket lifted off from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station immediately (June 23) at 6:54 a.m. EDT (1054 GMT), carrying 27 spacecraft for Amazon’s Project Kuiper constellation towards low Earth orbit (LEO).
The launch got here every week later than initially deliberate; it had been scheduled for June 16 however was delayed by an Atlas V engine concern.
An Atlas V additionally launched the primary batch of Kuiper craft, sending 27 of them aloft from Cape Canaveral on April 28 (in addition to two prototype Kuiper satellites, which flew in October 2023).
And there will probably be many extra such liftoffs. The Venture Kuiper constellation will ultimately encompass greater than 3,200 satellites, which is able to go up on about 80 extra launches within the coming years.
ULA will do a lot of the lifting; Amazon booked eight Atlas V launches and 38 rides on its substitute, the Vulcan Centaur. However Venture Kuiper satellites can even fly on rockets constructed by SpaceX, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and European launch supplier Arianespace.
“These agreements comprise the most important industrial procurement of launch capability in historical past, and help hundreds of suppliers and extremely expert jobs throughout the U.S. and Europe,” Amazon wrote in a Project Kuiper description.
The corporate hopes to start out offering web service with the constellation later this yr.
Venture Kuiper will compete with SpaceX’s Starlink, which already offers service to clients world wide utilizing more than 7,600 operational satellites in LEO.
Starlink is the most important satellite tv for pc constellation ever assembled, and it is rising on a regular basis; SpaceX has already launched 55 Starlink missions this yr alone.
And these aren’t the one two broadband initiatives underway in LEO. For instance, China has already launched spacecraft for 2 completely different megaconstellations, Guowang (“Nationwide Community”) and Qianfan (“Thousand Sails”). Each of those networks will characteristic greater than 10,000 satellites, if all goes in line with plan.