Amazon’s Project Kuiper has reportedly announced the booking of nearly 83 launches on three separate rockets to get its upcoming satellites into orbit.
The satellites will fly on rockets currently developed by US-based United Launch Alliance, European launch provider Arianespace, and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin.
The combined flights are slated to take place over five years and will enable Project Kuiper to launch significant bulk of its planned 3,236 satellite constellation.
The e-comm giant did not offer details on the cost of launch contracts, but it is investing billions of dollars over three deals, according to relevant sources. Amazon also asserted that the deal is history’s largest commercial launch vehicle procurement.
Project Kuiper needs a substantial amount of rocketry to establish its mega constellation in orbit. The company intends to create a huge array of satellites in low Earth orbit developed to offer low-latency broadband internet across the world.
To access the system, users must buy one of the user antennas of Project Kuiper which was previewed by the company two years ago. The terminals examine the sky, looking for overhead satellites. Those satellites transmit ground station signals, facilities that are already plugged into the current infrastructure of fiberoptic internet, to and from the antennas.
The idea is like the ever-thriving Starlink program of SpaceX which plans to establish a constellation of tens of thousands of satellites also developed to offer broadband internet from low Earth orbit. Nevertheless, Starlink is already a bit ahead of Project Kuiper.
So far, SpaceX has sent over 2,000 satellites into orbit and has commenced limited-service worldwide, with nearly 250,000 subscribers accessing the system till now.
However, Amazon hopes to change this scenario. In 2021, Amazon announced that it bought 9 launches of the Atlas V rocket, the workhorse of the United Launch Alliance, to send satellite batches into orbit. Whereas in November, Project Kuiper unveiled its plans to launch its first pilot satellites on an experimental new rocket RS1 developed by ABL Space Systems.
There are no changes in the agreement between Project Kuiper and ABL Space Systems.
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