The battle of billionaires in the space between Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk is ready to enter a new sand: satellite internet.
Amazon, the company that Mr. Bezos began as a bookseller online three decades ago, now a merchandising giant, the owner of the James Bond franchise, a seller of electronic devices such as Echo Smart Speakers and one of the most powerful suppliers of cloud computing.
So, it may not be a surprise that Amazon is now launching the first thousands of thousands of satellites known as Project Kuiper to provide another option for the approach connected in the modern world. Beander’s high speed Internet market to the orbit is currently dominated by Spacex Rocket Company by Elon Musk, which operates a similar service, Starlink. Starlink, with thousands of satellites in orbit and more launch almost every week, already serves several million customers worldwide.
The first attempt to send the satellites to orbit, on April 9, was postponed due to the bad weather on the launch site. On Monday, the company is ready to try again.
When the launch and how can I see it?
The first 27 satellites of the Kuiper project are scheduled to take off Monday between 7 and 9 pm, east time from the Cape Canaveral space force station in Florida. They will fly in an Atlas V, a rocket made by United Launch Alliance, a joint company between Boeing and Lockheed Martin.
ULA plans to provide live coverage from 6:35 pm, the company says that climatic conditions are currently 70 percent favorable for time launch.
The spacecraft will display the Kuiper satellites in a circular orbit at 280 miles above the surface. The satellite propulsion system will gradually elevate that orbit at an altitude of 393 miles.
What is Project Kuiper?
Project Kuiper will be a constellation of Internet satellites aimed at providing high -speed data connections to almost all points of the earth. Doing this successful will require thousands of satellites, and Amazon’s goal is to operate more than 3,200 in the coming years.
The company will compete with Spacex Starlink, a service that was originally marketed mainly to residential customers.
Although Kuiper also points to that market, particularly in remote areas, it will also be integrated with Amazon web services, the company’s cloud computing offer, which is popular among large corporations and governments around the world. That could make it more attractive to companies that involve satellite or prognostic images of time that not only need to move large amounts of the Internet, but also to carry out calculations in the data.
Terrestrial stations will connect Kuiper satellites with web services infrastructure in a way that could also allow companies to communicate with their own remote equipment. For example, Amazon has suggested that energy companies could use Kuiper to monitor and control remote wind farms or drilling platforms on the high seas.
In October 2023, two Kuiper prototype satellites were launched to test technology. Amazon said the tests were successful. These prototypes were never meaning to serve in the operational constellation, and after seven months they were pushed back to the atmosphere, where they burned. The company said that since then it has updated the designs of “all systems and subsystem on board.”
“There is a big difference between the launch of two satellites and the launch of 3,000 satellites,” said Rajev Badyal, a Amazon executive by Kuiper, in a promotional video before launch.
When will Amazon provide the Internet service from space?
Amazon told the Federal Communications Commission in 2020 that the service would begin after its first 578 satellites had deployed. The company has said it hopes to connect customers to the Internet at the end of this year.
While a fully functional constellation needs and is one of the satellites, the company can offer service in specific regions with FAR Feer in orbit before expanding to a more global coverage later.
The FCC constellation approach was required with the requirement that at least half of the satellites should be implemented before July 30, 2026. Industry analysts say that the company could an extension if it has demonstrated substantial progress by then.
Bringing satellites in orbit also depends on rocket launches that occur in time, which can be a problem if there are not enough available rockets. Amazon also needs to build hundreds of land stations, to transmit your signals to users.