Amazon has announced the first of its Project Kuiper internet satellites will launch on Friday, October 6.
The two satellites, dubbed KuiperSat-1 and KuiperSat-2, will be aboard an Atlas V rocket, which will take off from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.
If all goes well, the satellites will enter low Earth orbit, at an altitude of some 311 miles.
“This is Amazon’s first time putting satellites into space, and we’re going to learn an incredible amount regardless of how the mission unfolds,” says Project Kuiper vice president of technology Rajeev Badyal.
The eventual aim is to establish a satellite array similar to that of the Elon Musk-owned Starlink.
Its array provides internet via satellite, and you can sign up for it right here in the UK already.
Amazon has “plans to manufacture and deploy” 3,200 of these internet satellites “over the next six years”.
However, these initial two are test runs and, once their job is done, the Project Kuiper team will “actively deorbit” them. They’ll drop out of orbit and burn up in re-entry to Earth’s atmosphere.
The tests will include deploying “solar arrays” to generate power, and testing the connection between the Kuiper team on the ground and the satellites themselves.
While this is the first big step in satellite internet via Amazon, Project Kuiper’s plans are perhaps surprisingly close at hand.
Project Kuiper history
The first satellites that will form part of the actual array used to transmit satellite internet are planned for the first half of 2024, while “beta testing with early commercial customers” is coming later that same year.
Kuiper was announced in 2019 as an Amazon project with largely the same outward aims it has now, using 3,200-odd satellites to “provide low-latency, high-speed broadband connectivity to unserved and underserved communities around the world,” an Amazon statement from the time read.
In 2020, Amazon said it had developed an antenna that could be used to receive satellite internet at speeds of up to 400Mbps. We saw a revised version of the hardware earlier this year, which can achieve gigabit speeds.
In 2021, the Project Kuiper team announced its intention to launch its first test satellites in late 2022. Why the two-year delay? There were issues with securing a reliable rocket to take the satellites up into orbit.
Amazon’s Project Kuiper is now roughly five-and-a-half years behind SpaceX’s Starlink, which launched its first test satellites in February 2018.
According to an online satellite map, Starlink has launched 5,104 satellites to date, and 4,268 are active at the time of reporting. Starlink’s satellite internet is available in London, and starts at £75 a month.
