Amazon launches 1st Kuiper internet satellites

What happened

Amazon Monday night launched its first 27 Project Kuiper internet satellites into orbit. The company aims to have more than 3,200 of the transmitters orbiting about 400 miles above the planet's surface within a few years, competing with SpaceX's dominant Starlink satellite constellation.

Who said what

Amazon made major upgrades since sending two Kuiper test satellites into orbit in 2023, but "there are some things you can only learn in flight," project vice president Rajeev Badyal said. Although Amazon founder Jeff Bezos also owns a rocket company, Blue Origin, this first batch of satellites was sent into orbit in an Atlas V rocket from the United Launch Alliance.

The "battle of billionaires in space" has reached the satellite internet arena, though Elon Musk's Starlink has a sizable head start with more than 7,000 satellites in orbit and "several million customers around the world," The New York Times said. Still, Kuiper's integration with Amazon Web Services, a cloud computing offering "popular with large corporations and governments" worldwide, could make it "more attractive" to users like weather forecasters who need to run calculations on the large amounts of data it moves over the internet.

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What next?

It will take "many hours, if not days," for Amazon to "establish contact with all 27 satellites and know if they are operational," the Times said. The company "already has purchased dozens of rocket launches from United Launch Alliance and Blue Origin" to get its other satellites in orbit, The Associated Press said.