A harrowing hour or two after Amazon.com Inc. launched its first satellites, it appeared the company had lost one of them. The two prototypes entered orbit over the Atlantic Ocean at 2:24 p.m. Eastern time on October 6th. An Amazon antenna on the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius made contact with both, but only one vehicle checked in during a subsequent handover to another station. Amazon scanned the sky behind the first satellite for a signal from the second, but heard silence.
The incident threatened to shatter the spirits of employees gathered to celebrate the launch at Postdoc Brewing, not far from Amazon's space company in the Seattle area. The team had spent years building satellites from scratch and faced months of launch delays. Now that they were airborne, Amazon had to make contact to make sure their solar panels were activated. Otherwise, the batteries would run out and the satellites would fail – a major setback for the retail and cloud computing giant, which is already late in the race to build a profitable business selling internet access from low Earth orbit.
In Amazon's Mission Operations Center, a conference room filled with large video screens, computers and cases of energy drinks, satellite operations manager Yonina DeKeyser and her deputies worked to piece together the scraps of data they had collected. Between the third and fourth contacts, the command, navigation and control team reported that the missing satellite was OK. The incoming information could only come from two healthy spacecraft. Rajeev Badyal, the head of the project, shouted triumphantly.
At the brewery, an Amazon looking at his phone broke through the noise, raised clenched fists and shouted, “We are power positive!” His colleagues cheered. The team later discovered that some of Amazon's ground-based antennas had been looking in the wrong place, mistaking the second satellite that passed by for the first.
Amazon executives tend to describe their Project Kuiper satellite company in philanthropic terms, emphasizing its potential to connect people in remote or impoverished areas to education and global trade. On a less altruistic note, Amazon also hopes the $10 billion-plus project can transform the company into a global telecommunications giant. The company plans to sell rooftop antennas to individual internet users, cloud computing and data recovery services to businesses, and connectivity to wireless companies to connect remote cell towers to their networks starting in 2025.
The Kuiper project is among the Seattle-based company's biggest bets and one of the few that have survived the two-year cost-cutting campaign that has wiped out many of the speculative projects started late in Jeff Bezos' tenure as chief executive. It's a huge undertaking in an industry that has seen more bankruptcies than successful companies. Broadband is already widely available, and in many places where it isn't, it's not clear whether people can afford space-based internet. Some Amazon observers see Project Kuiper as another front in the rivalry between Bezos and fellow billionaire Elon Musk, whose SpaceX operates the Starlink constellation of internet satellites.
Amazon is betting that its system is state-of-the-art and can provide the capacity and internet speeds to compete not only with Starlink, which has a big lead, but also with terrestrial telecommunications companies. At least Amazon is building an alternative to Musk's service at a time when governments and companies alike are looking for ways to reduce their dependence on the unpredictable and controversial businessman.
Over the past two months, Amazon engineers have put their first satellites through a series of tests. They made a video call, bought a toy rocket set from Amazon.com, and tested a laser system designed to extend the range of each satellite. Now comes the really difficult part. To meet the terms of its license with regulators, Amazon must build the equivalent of two satellites every day until July 2026 – and find a way to transport them into space.
“Building two satellites is very difficult,” Badyal said. “Building more than 3,000 is exponentially more difficult.”
Project Kuiper, named for the belt of dwarf planets, ice and rock beyond Neptune, was born out of a thought experiment, according to Dave Limp, Amazon's longtime head of consumer electronics. Bezos had regularly asked executives to think about distant hurdles that could slow the company, prompting Amazon to spend billions on warehouse robots and fleets of aircraft, big rigs and delivery trucks.
About six years ago, Amazon executives increasingly focused on broadband internet. Their various businesses, including retail sites, movie studios and business software, all rely on access to the Internet. “If you wanted to grow, you had to find these hundreds of millions of people who weren’t currently Amazon customers,” Limp said in an interview. “Well, what’s the obstacle to getting them there?”
Amazon explored, among other things, drones and balloons for Internet distribution, approaches that were tried and abandoned by Facebook (now Meta Platforms Inc.) and Alphabet Inc.'s Google. Amazon has decided to provide internet via satellite.
The idea wasn't new. In the 1990s, a company called Teledesic, not far from the suburban Seattle garage where Bezos founded Amazon, set out to launch a constellation of hundreds of satellites. Most communications satellites at the time were in geostationary orbit, which corresponded to the Earth's rotation and fixed each spacecraft to the ground from a person's perspective. Such satellites power the global positioning system, weather tracking, and in-flight Internet surfing.
Teledesic assumed that satellites in a much lower orbit, the domain of space stations, could take advantage of the shorter trip to Earth to better compete with terrestrial phone and Internet companies. Despite the support of Bill Gates of Microsoft Corp. and the cell phone mogul Craig McCaw, the company failed after the dot-com bankruptcy. Rockets were expensive and the aerospace industry preferred to continue making customized satellites for governments.
About a decade later, Musk seized on the idea and cut out the middlemen. His rocket company, Space Exploration Technologies Corp., reduced the cost of reaching orbit and opted to build satellites in-house. Musk hired Badyal, the future Kuiper boss, to bring it to life.
Badyal was born in India and spent much of his childhood in Kuwait, where his father, an architect, was stationed. He came to the United States to study and earned a master's degree in electrical and computer engineering from Oregon State University. He found work at a nearby Hewlett Packard campus and helped develop the printhead that transfers ink to the page in inkjet printers. He later worked on the first optical mice, sparing future generations the task of cleaning a dirty tracking ball, before moving to Microsoft, where he helped develop the company's ill-fated Zune music player.
Rapid technological advances in consumer electronics enabled companies outside the aerospace industry to build satellites. People like Badyal, skilled in on-the-fly design changes and mass production, had the right tools for a new generation of satellites that could be built quickly and cheaply. After Badyal joined the Starlink project in 2014, he opened a store in suburban Redmond, Washington. Four years later, the first two satellites were launched on a SpaceX rocket.
In June 2018, Musk flew to Seattle. Soon Badyal and most of his team were outside. Colleagues were told they had been fired. Badyal says he and Musk simply decided to part ways. Musk put another lieutenant in charge and ordered him to strip the design down to the bare minimum to get a barebones system up and running as quickly as possible. Today, SpaceX says it is building six satellites per day. There are more than 5,000 in orbit, serving more than 2 million customers.
It is Bezos' maxim that Amazon will only move into new fields if it has expertise – or can acquire it quickly. Amazon's satellite initiative was just a two-page draft when Limp learned that Starlink's founding team was looking for work. He called Badyal in August 2018.
Two months later, Badyal and five Starlink colleagues were at Amazon, designing a new constellation in two conference rooms covered by a black curtain that curious employees saw as an invitation to poke their heads through. “It was very safe,” said Naveen Kachroo, one of the first employees. When their plan to send 3,236 satellites across the globe at an altitude of between 590 and 630 kilometers became public months later, Musk called Bezos a copycat on Twitter.
Amazon engineers have developed a terminal, the device that customers will one day use to receive data from satellites, that they say they could make for about $750. Bezos sent them back to the drawing board. It had to be even cheaper. Amazon's antenna chief Nima Mahanfar and his team have combined some antenna features, and the company says it can now build its 11-inch-square main terminal for less than $400. It offers internet speeds of up to 400 megabits per second, which is about twice the average broadband speed in US households.
Project Kuiper employs more than 1,600 people, a mix of consumer electronics veterans and career experts in the aerospace industry. DeKeyser, the director of satellite operations, has a master's degree in aeronautical engineering and says landing at Amazon would have been unthinkable early in her career. The team is the rare organization within Amazon that is led primarily by people who come from elsewhere. Lead satellite engineer Paul O'Brien, Kachroo and Mahanfar all worked on Microsoft's Zune.
“You have to innovate at a much faster pace” than in traditional space manufacturing, said Badyal, a mustachioed, gray-haired engineer with a gravelly voice and a penchant for classic cocktails. His office at Project Kuiper's headquarters in Redmond, in a building that once made forklifts, overlooks a research and development lab where engineers make custom aluminum parts, assemble circuit boards and test antennas in a cavernous, anechoic chamber.
Amazon's satellites combine cutting-edge technology – including optical satellite links, better known as space lasers – with simple, proven components that limit cost and weight. “Kuiper is designing spacecraft that are fewer in number, larger in size and higher in power” than SpaceX's first generation of vehicles, said Caleb Henry, who tracks private space companies for Quilty Space. “There is a real difference in design philosophy between the two.”
The satellites will enter space packed in the nose of a rocket and begin their initial orbit in a dive until an automated system points them back toward Earth. At this point, the solar panels that were folded during startup should unfold automatic and based on nearly a century-old technology: actuators that heat a wad of wax that expands to press on a bolt that releases the assembly.
When a customer loads a website, the home terminal sends a signal to a circular array of thousands of antenna modules that look like small green Lego bricks with two dots. Bowl-shaped gateway antennas forward the request to Amazon's ground stations, the connection to the Internet. Reaction data is fired back up and then down to the terminal of one of the sets Rows of Lego bricks.
All of this happens in milliseconds as the vehicle speeds by at a speed of 17,000 miles per hour (27,359 km/h). By the time the satellite is out of sight, another one should be in sight. Everyone has their own drive system. Amazon residents compare the engine's power to the flapping of a dragonfly's wings, which, when fired for hours in the vacuum of space, can overcome the pull of gravity.
Amazon once aimed to produce the satellites for $500,000 apiece and keep their weight under 500 kilograms (1,100 pounds), according to two people familiar with the matter. The size and weight of Amazon's upcoming series models could not be found out. Based on Amazon's launch vehicles, Quilty Space estimates that Kuiper satellites weigh between 600 and 800 kilograms. A photo released by Amazon of its prototypes on the way to launch showed each one in a cubic steel box about the size of a human.
Kachroo, now business development director at Kuiper, says Amazon will sell connectivity directly to individual internet users, but also through mobile and broadband service providers depending on the country. Amazon has announced partnerships with Verizon Communications Inc. in the U.S., Vodafone Group Plc in Europe and Africa and Japan's NTT. Service testing will begin in the second half of next year and Amazon ultimately expects to sell it to tens of millions of customers.
“We want to serve enterprises, governments, schools, hospitals and mobile operators, so we don’t have a single channel or segment from which we make money,” Kachroo said. Amazon, which did not disclose pricing, so far has licenses to operate in more than 15 countries, including Brazil, Canada, France, Mexico and the United States.
The company will provide and provide private connectivity to businesses and governments through its Amazon Web Services unit Service quality guarantees that SpaceX still has to offer. AWS, the largest provider of leased computing power and data storage, will be able to offer bundled products with Internet access in the coming years, a benefit that Amazon's cloud computing rivals cannot provide on their own.
Kuiper employees tend not to bring up Starlink (another Bezosism: Don't obsess over the competition), but analysts say Amazon has a chance to differentiate itself by simply running a satellite business, sans Musks personal drama or business entanglements. Other companies are building so-called mega-constellations, but Starlink is by far the largest and most powerful.
Officials in Taiwan, seeking backup internet access in the event of a war with China, are wary of relying on Musk, who has business ties with Beijing, Bloomberg reported. In Ukraine, Starlink was a lifeline after the Russian invasion, but earlier this year it emerged that Musk had rejected a request from Kiev to expand coverage to allow for a Ukrainian advance. The world's richest man called for an end to the conflict on terms favorable to Russia, and his biographer published text messages between Musk and Ukraine's deputy prime minister.
SpaceX, which did not respond to requests for comment, also avoids the long-term contracts and exclusivity agreements that business customers tend to seek, said Lluc Palerm, an analyst at research institute NSR. “You are not perceived as the best partner in the industry”
In an interview, Kuiper's regulatory chief Julie Zoller gave no details on how Amazon would handle the political entanglements and said the company would defer to the State Department. Zoller, who began her career installing satellite equipment on U.S. military bases, acknowledged that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy can't imagine negotiating terms of service via text message. “Customers are literally saying, 'Why can't you all go faster,'” Kachroo said. “They love the fact that there is competition.”
Executives insist Kuiper is on schedule, but the company hoped to get its prototypes in the air nearly a year early. The proof is in orbit: Engraved on an aluminum housing part of each spacecraft are the names of the people who have been working on the project since August 2022.
Amazon's first flight into space – on a new rocket built by a startup – exploded on the launch pad. Its second, the new Vulcan Centaur, built by United Launch Alliance, the US space company, was due to launch this summer before an explosion occurred during testing. Desperate to get its satellites flying, Amazon chartered an Atlas V, a 21-year-old ULA rocket capable of carrying much heavier loads. The launch was the rocket equivalent of renting a city bus to take two people to the movies.
Now Amazon has to get the remaining satellites there. Project Kuiper is the largest commercial launch contract in history, including 47 ULA launches as well as rockets from ArianeGroup and Bezos' Blue Origin. But only one of those rockets — the Atlas, which Amazon has booked for eight more launches — flew. Blue Origin has never sent a spacecraft into orbit, and the rocket it hopes to get there is years behind schedule. (Limp, Badyal's old boss, left Amazon this month to run Blue Origin.)
Earlier this month, Amazon booked three launches with SpaceX, a cumbersome one deal required by Kuiper's Tight launch schedule and lack of alternatives. Amazon says it has been in discussions with all major market launch providers for years. It also disputes that the decision was influenced by a lawsuit from a pension fund that claimed Amazon did not consider using SpaceX in part because of the rivalry between Bezos and Musk, driving up costs. Amazon says the claims are accurate without merit.
ULA is expanding a factory in Alabama and upgrading a facility in Cape Canaveral, Florida, to quickly stack Kuiper satellites on rockets and deliver them to the launch pad. Suppliers of rocket engines and avionics equipment are increasing production. “Everything is on track to be ready on time,” said ULA CEO Tory Bruno. “As long as we don’t have to completely change the design, we’ll be fine.”
However Amazon's satellites get into space, Project Kuiper's Federal Communications Commission license requires 1,618 of them to be there by July 2026 and the other half three years later. Amazon plans to build them at a dedicated manufacturing site in Kirkland, Washington, where crews are still installing machines and performing utility work. Therefore, Amazon's first satellites will be assembled at Kuiper's headquarters, which is being transformed from a research and development facility into a crash production line.