The battle for billionaires in the space between Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk is ready to enter a new arena: satellite internet. But the game will have to wait another day, because the Space Coast of Florida again disrupted a launch attempt on Wednesday evening.
Amazon, the company that started Mr Bezos three decades ago as an online bookseller, is now a merchandising colossus, the owner of the James Bond -Franchise, a seller of electronic gadgets such as Echo Smart Speakers and one of the most powerful providers of Cloud Computing.
So maybe it is no surprise that Amazon is now launching the first few thousand satellites known as a Kuiper project to offer another option to stay connected in the modern world. The market for raying high-speed internet to the land of Orbit is currently dominated by the SpaceX Rocket Company by Elon Musk, which operates a similar service, Starlink. Starlink, with thousands of satellites in a job around the earth and launched almost every week, has already served several million customers around the world.
Why was the launch postponed?
The first 27 project Kuiper -Satellites were planned to lift the eastern time of Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on Wednesday between 19 and 9:00 pm. They had to fly on an Atlas V, a rocket made by United Launch Alliance, a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin. Ulla
But the flight attempt was chased by bad weather near the launch location, with rain, wind and cloudy circumstances that made a lift unsafe. After pushing back several times during the two -hour window, the ULA flight director decided to scrub the flight around 8:41 PM
The company is investigating the following opportunity for a launch.
What is Project Kuiper?
Project Kuiper will be a constellation of internet satellites that are intended to offer high-speed data connections to almost every point on earth. Doing this successfully, requires thousands of satellites, and the goal of Amazon is to serve more than 3,200 in the coming years.
The company will compete with SpaceX's Starlink, a service that was originally sold mainly to residential customers.
Although Kuiper also strives for that market, especially in remote areas, it will also be integrated with Amazon Web Services, the Cloud Computing offer from the company, which is popular with large companies and governments around the world. This can make it more attractive for companies with satellite images or weather forecast that not only have to move large amounts of data via the internet, but also to perform calculations about the data.
Ground stations will connect the Kuiper satellites with the Web Services infrastructure in a way that could also enable companies to communicate with their own external equipment. For example, Amazon has suggested that energy companies can use Kuiper to check and check external wind farms or offshore drilling platforms.
In October 2023, two prototype Kuiper -Satellites were launched to test the technology. Amazon said the tests were successful. Those prototypes were never intended to serve in the operational constellation, and after seven months they were reversed in the atmosphere where they burned. The company said it has since updated the designs of “every system and sub -system on board.”
“There is a big difference between launching two satellites and the launch of 3000 satellites,” said Rajeev Badyal, an Amazon director responsible for Kuiper, in a promotional video prior to the launch.
When does Amazon offer internet services from space?
Amazon told the Federal Communications Commission in 2020 that the service would start after it had deployed its first 578 satellites. The company has said that it expects customers to connect with the internet later this year.
Although a fully functional zodiac sign needs thousands of satellites, the company can offer service in specific regions with much less in a job around the earth before he later expands more global coverage.
The approval of the FCC of the constellation came with a requirement that at least half of the satellites had to be deployed on July 30, 2026. Industrial analysts say that the company could get an extension if it has shown substantial progress by that time.
Getting the satellites in the job in the track also depends on rocket launches that take place on schedule, which can be a problem if there are not enough rockets available. Amazon also has to build hundreds of ground stations to pass on their signals to users.
