Amazon Reveals Its Project Kuiper Satellite Internet Dishes, Targets 2024 Launch (reuters.com) 41
Amazon.com plans to launch its first internet satellites to space in the first half of 2024 and offer initial commercial tests shortly after, the company said Tuesday, as it prepares to vie with Elon Musk's SpaceX and others to provide broadband internet globally. Reuters reports: Amazon's satellite internet unit, Project Kuiper, will begin mass-producing the satellites later this year, the company said. Those will be the first of over 3,000 satellites the technology giant plans to launch in low-Earth orbit in the next few years. "We'll definitely be beta testing with commercial customers in 2024," Dave Limp, senior vice president of Amazon devices, said at a conference in Washington.
The 2024 deployment target would keep Amazon on track to fulfill a regulatory mandate to launch half its entire Kuiper network of 3,236 satellites by 2026. Limp, who oversees Amazon's consumer devices powerhouse, said the company plans to make "three to five" satellites a day to reach that goal. With plans to pump more than $10 billion into the Kuiper network, Amazon sees its experience producing millions of devices from its consumer electronics powerhouse as an edge over rival SpaceX, the Musk-owned space company whose Starlink network already has roughly 4,000 satellites in space.
Amazon plans to launch a pair of prototype satellites early this year aboard a new rocket from the Boeing-Lockheed joint venture United Launch Alliance. The 2024 launch, carrying the initial production satellites, is expected to be the first of many more in a swift deployment campaign using rockets Amazon procured in 2021 and 2022. The company on Tuesday also revealed a slate of three different terminals, or antennas, that will connect customers with its Kuiper satellites in orbit. In a blog post on Tuesday, Amazon detailed its new terminals with photos and pricing.
Standard Customer Terminal: "Project Kuiper's standard customer terminal measures less than 11 inches square and 1 inch thick. It weighs less than five pounds without its mounting bracket. Despite this modest footprint, the device will be one of the most powerful commercially available customer terminals of its size, delivering speeds up to 400 megabits per second (Mbps). Amazon expects to produce these terminals for less than $400 each."
"Most Affordable" Terminal: "A 7-inch square design will be Project Kuiper's smallest and most affordable customer terminal. Weighing just 1 pound and offering speeds up to 100 Mbps, its portability and affordability will create opportunities to serve even more customers around the world. This design will connect residential customers who need an even lower-cost model, as well as government and enterprise customers pursuing applications like ground mobility and internet of things (IoT)."
"Most Capable" Antenna Model: "Project Kuiper's largest, most capable model is designed for enterprise, government, and telecommunications applications that require even more bandwidth. The device measures 19 inches by 30 inches, and will deliver speeds up to 1 gigabit per second (Gbps)."
The 2024 deployment target would keep Amazon on track to fulfill a regulatory mandate to launch half its entire Kuiper network of 3,236 satellites by 2026. Limp, who oversees Amazon's consumer devices powerhouse, said the company plans to make "three to five" satellites a day to reach that goal. With plans to pump more than $10 billion into the Kuiper network, Amazon sees its experience producing millions of devices from its consumer electronics powerhouse as an edge over rival SpaceX, the Musk-owned space company whose Starlink network already has roughly 4,000 satellites in space.
Amazon plans to launch a pair of prototype satellites early this year aboard a new rocket from the Boeing-Lockheed joint venture United Launch Alliance. The 2024 launch, carrying the initial production satellites, is expected to be the first of many more in a swift deployment campaign using rockets Amazon procured in 2021 and 2022. The company on Tuesday also revealed a slate of three different terminals, or antennas, that will connect customers with its Kuiper satellites in orbit. In a blog post on Tuesday, Amazon detailed its new terminals with photos and pricing.
Standard Customer Terminal: "Project Kuiper's standard customer terminal measures less than 11 inches square and 1 inch thick. It weighs less than five pounds without its mounting bracket. Despite this modest footprint, the device will be one of the most powerful commercially available customer terminals of its size, delivering speeds up to 400 megabits per second (Mbps). Amazon expects to produce these terminals for less than $400 each."
"Most Affordable" Terminal: "A 7-inch square design will be Project Kuiper's smallest and most affordable customer terminal. Weighing just 1 pound and offering speeds up to 100 Mbps, its portability and affordability will create opportunities to serve even more customers around the world. This design will connect residential customers who need an even lower-cost model, as well as government and enterprise customers pursuing applications like ground mobility and internet of things (IoT)."
"Most Capable" Antenna Model: "Project Kuiper's largest, most capable model is designed for enterprise, government, and telecommunications applications that require even more bandwidth. The device measures 19 inches by 30 inches, and will deliver speeds up to 1 gigabit per second (Gbps)."
ULA? (Score:2)
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Blue Origin is a separate company from Amazon, but I get your meaning. New Glenn has to have a reason for existing. If New Glenn isn't ready in time, they can easily (albeit probably expensively) switch providers, but to start recouping the cost of developing New Glenn, it needs a steady and continuous stream of launches. Without Project Kuiper, it would never come close to making sense financially.
Re:ULA? (Score:5, Insightful)
New Glenn has to have a reason for existing.
Outside of some cushy NASA/defence contracts to sustain a viable backup US launch system (though they do have SLS now), I can't really see the reasons for New Glenn anyway. It is massively behind schedule, and more importantly, behind SpaceX. They need to get their engines into orbit, then a rocket of their own with first stage return, then get that reliable and get the costs down. None of this is going to happen anytime soon - it even took SpaceX many years to achieve all that.
But in the meantime, SpaceX is making Falcon 9 (and New Glenn) obsolete with Starship, and getting first mover advantage on the satellite internet market. By the time Amazon get's their network up, they will have to offer huge discounts because SpaceX will have global coverage and better performance.
The whole thing - the rocket, the satellite network - is going to be a huge money pit because they are so far behind.
It would be like if a billionaire said 'hey let's just copy what google does' and 20 years later is still promising that they're going to release a search engine soon that will blow google away, then meanwhile ChatGPT is just about to make all that technology obsolete. This is the situation with BO today, and it's sad because if Elon had real competition we would probably be on mars by now.
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Commercially, right now, yes, doing anything as well as SpaceX is a problem. However, all companies trip up at some point, and so there's always room for a second provider. Sure, they might be a "firmly second place in the market" provider, but useful none the less.
To turn this into something we can all relate to, Amazon is the number one online web shop, right? There's no need for ebay then, because Amazon is waaay better than them in just about every way. But of course, Ebay continues to exist, and even t
Re: ULA? (Score:4, Informative)
Amazon has purchased the remaining atlas launches already and a bunch of Vulcan ones. The problem is volume. SpaceX ramped up launch cadence just for starlink launching 2-3 times a month to hit their numbers. Ula struggles to launch 1 every 2-3onths.
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Hopefully Amazon doesn't need so many satellites. Starlink is bad enough already.
Starlink only exists to create business for SpaceX. Creating demand for launches helps them get costs down. Amazon will want as few launches as possible, to keep costs down. So hopefully their system uses fewer satellites.
The only upside here is that there will be some competition to force prices down.
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Re: ULA? (Score:2)
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You forget India in the list of countries providing launch services.
ob. "WaMEJ?" post (Score:2)
Where are my engines Jeff? [spaceexplored.com]
-- Tory Bruno CEO of ULA
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Well, they probably wanted to use their own orbital launch system, but then they remembered that it doesn't exist and they have absolutely no experience with getting anything into any orbit at all, much less the precision orbits they're going to need for creating a multi-thousand satellite constellation.
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Experience can be a crutch. Sometimes you have to unlearn things.
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As much as I despise Elon Musk he seems to have hired competent people for SpaceX, or at least accidentally allowed competent people to hire competent people.
Unlearning legacy practices can be important if you've reached a developmental plateau but there's not really much evidence SpaceX has plateaued.
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Virtue signal much?
Re: Experience (Score:2)
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It isn't a virtue to despise people, so...?
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It is for the terminally woke! Just look at the haters on the left today.
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Wait, wait, wait... let me get this straight.
As much as I despise Elon Musk
Virtue signal much?
You and a couple of similar snowflakes, find it SO morally reprehensible to express personal opinion on someone - that you're accusing the person who's expressing that opinion of, what is clearly in your mind a morally reprehensive act, of professing their moral judgement?
I.e. You're shouting "You'll moral me? I'll moral YOU!!!" into the void - for a slight that exists only in your mind.
Have you sought mental help? Maybe you should.
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Uh, no. Utterly wrong. Virtue signalling is performative by nature.
Consult a good dictionary and try again.
Kuiper (Score:1)
How about we stop cluttering ... (Score:1)
... the sky and consolidate all services and devices that need to be in orbit on to collated satellite platforms and force everyone that needs a satellite connection to work together? This is getting out of hand. ... That's my impression anyway.
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You are exactly right. We don't need n different satellite networks in orbit doing comms. We need a few sat networks that carriers lease space on. Not because of any economic model, but because of the efficiency of orbital space. We can't just keep launching things into space until the planet is surrounded by a cloud of redundant satellites. Think of a sat network modeled after the internet, where nodes are available for anyone to use.
This, of course, relies on the same folly of the origins of the actual in
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If we can't even get it together enough to do that with terrestrial mobile telephone networks, how can you figure that we'd be able to do that with satellite networks?
Operating 3+ cellular networks that overlay each other is incredibly wasteful, but yet here we are. And now we're taking that same operating model into orbit.
Re:How about we stop cluttering ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you realize how big space is. If there were 100,000 satellites in space in the same exact orbital altitude that's like one car per entire state of rhode island. And that's if all the satellites are in the same orbital altitude .. which they aren't. How is that "clutter"? Space is pretty fucking empty.
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That depends on what you need to do in space. Different orbits do not matter when you do something required to traverse orbits. Distance between moving objects do not matter for continuous observation periods. As it stands evasive maneuvers of various orbiting bodies are required to say nothing when there's more of them up there (sure out of an abundance of caution, but the cost here is high). And as it stands satellites already interfere and need to be compensated for for a variety of ground space measurem
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CGI (Score:3)
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Those aren't photos, they're all CGI renders.
They are more real than Amazon's product reviews, product descriptions, or their sense of human empathy so I'll allow it.
excellent... not (Score:1)
Yes lets send more objects in LEO so we are sure no more telescopes need to be built on the planet (enjoy some white stripes). Also, how about that issue with satellite burn-up that remains in the outer layers of the atmosphere?
https://www.space.com/starlink... [space.com]
Drones? (Score:2)
Are there any objections to using them on unmanned aerial vehicles? I know a motivated customer. :)
The devil is in the monthly fees (Score:2)
No word on how much this is going to cost every month whether you use it or not.