Starlink has been growing without competition for six years. Now an ambitious competitor has started throwing satellites: Amazon

In the early hours First 27 operational satellites of the Kuiper constellation of Amazon. Starlink is at last company.

An ambitious competitor. Project Kuiper was born in 2018, a year before Spacex launched the first 60 satellites of its Starlink constellation, which offers broadband satellite Internet. However, waiting for the vulcan rockets of ULA and New Glenn de Blue Origin to be available, Amazon only He had launched two test satellites… until now.

The technological giant has finally began to deploy its initial constellation of 3,232 satellites in the low terrestrial orbit (between 590 and 630 km of altitude) to offer low latency connections in places where terrestrial networks do not arrive or are insufficient. When available, The service will have plans of 100 Mbps, 400 Mbps and up to 1 GBPS speed.

Curves come. Although this launch marks Kuiper’s operational start, Amazon is still exposed to several challenges. The main is the time: the project has been delayed about its calendar and its FCC license for approximately one year have half of the constellation (1,618 satellites) In orbit for July 2026, a date that seems difficult to meet without an extension, since the company does not manufacture its own rockets like Spacex.

Kuiper’s rockets. While Blue Origin is a company by Jeff Bezos and there is, say, certain synergies between both companies (in addition to a well -known enmity with Elon Musk), His New Glenn orbital rocket has only flown onceand has not yet managed to demonstrate its ability to land. Reuse has been fundamental in Starlink’s success: the Falcon 9 rocket, which Spacex partially recovers, has launched more than 8,000 Starlink satellites in six years.

Amazon’s constellation depends to such a third party that Amazon made the “major Commercial acquisition of launch vehicles of the story “in 2022. Only with ULA has contracts to launch another seven atlas and up to 38 Vulcan. It has also reached agreements with Arianegroup to use the European rocket Ariane 6 and, of course, with Blue Origin to use the New Glenn; the only one with the capacity to land of the four pitchers.

China and Europe go to their roll. Despite the difficulties, Kuiper is the first Starlink competitor who has a financial muscle at Spacex, provided that Amazon is willing to play in the long term.

In Europe we have an already quite advanced commercial constellation, but that plays in another league. Oneweb of Eutelsat operates a constellation of about 630 Leo satellites, but its approach is mainly B2B and government, and its satellite density is much less than that of Starlink.

China also goes to its roll, but it is deploying megaconstellations that could harm Starlink and Amazon. Spacesail already has satellites in orbit and plans to display 648 by 2025, with the aim of growing up to 15,000 satellites by 2030, with which could offer services up to 30% cheaper than Starlink in markets like Brazil. To this price war are added to others Chinese projects like Honguhu 3 either Guowangadding tens of thousands of satellites who will begin to cross the night sky without stopping.

Image | ULA, Amazon

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