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.
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
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.
-
Homes with great fireplacesFeature Featuring a suspended fireplace in Washington and two-sided Parisian fireplace in Florida
-
Is $140,000 the real poverty line?Feature Financial hardship is wearing Americans down, and the break-even point for many families keeps rising
-
Film reviews: ‘The Secret Agent’ and ‘Zootopia 2’Feature A Brazilian man living in a brutal era seeks answers and survival and Judy and Nick fight again for animal justice
-
Texts from a scammerFeature If you get a puzzling text message from a stranger, you may be the target of ‘pig butchering.’
-
Separating the real from the fake: tips for spotting AI slopThe Week Recommends Advanced AI may have made slop videos harder to spot, but experts say it’s still possible to detect them
-
Blackouts: Why the internet keeps breakingfeature Cloudflare was the latest in a string of outages
-
X update unveils foreign MAGA boostersSpeed Read The accounts were located in Russia and Nigeria, among other countries
-
AI agents: When bots browse the webfeature Letting robots do the shopping
-
Is AI to blame for recent job cuts?Today’s Big Question Numerous companies have called out AI for being the reason for the culling
-
‘Deskilling’: a dangerous side effect of AI useThe explainer Workers are increasingly reliant on the new technology
-
AI models may be developing a ‘survival drive’Under the radar Chatbots are refusing to shut down
