Amazon launches Kuiper satellite on Atlas V rocket
united launch alliance
Amazon is scheduled to launch its first satellite on October 6, and the company will begin planning a space internet service known as Project Kuiper to rival SpaceX’s Starlink.
The pair of satellites, called KuiperSat-1 and KuiperSat-2, are scheduled to launch on a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on October 6 at 7pm BST. They will be placed in orbit 500 kilometers above the Earth’s surface to test key components of the planned Kuiper mega-constellation of 3,200 satellites.
“It’s very important to test the satellite before launching the rest of the constellation,” says Tim Farrar, a British satellite communications consultant. “This is a huge step forward that we have been waiting for for a long time.”
Project Kuiper satellites are designed to connect to remote terminals on Earth, providing Internet access to remote and remote locations where connectivity is not possible.
Such a space internet has been the target of several companies in recent years, most notably SpaceX in the US and Eutelsat’s OneWeb in the UK. The former has already launched around 5,000 satellites and boasts around 2 million users, while OneWeb has nearly 650 of his satellites in orbit. Amazon is trying to play catch-up, Farrar said. “There are four of them, so it’s going to be very difficult.” “We’re at least five years behind SpaceX,” he says.
Amazon has committed to spending $10 billion on Kuiper. Last year, the company bought up virtually all available launch capacity around the world on all available non-SpaceX rockets. This is apparently to avoid funding a major competitor.
But many of the rockets Amazon plans to use, such as ULA’s Vulcan Centaur, are delayed in development. This angered some Amazon shareholders, who filed a lawsuit in August. personal rivalry A dispute between Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk revealed that Amazon was overlooking SpaceX’s Falcon rocket. Amazon dismissed these claims as “completely without merit.”
This delay led the company to turn to the Atlas V rocket to launch two prototype satellites, even though the rocket was much larger than needed. Not much is known about each Kuipersat, but each is estimated to have a mass of over 500 kilograms, which is too large for most small rockets in operation today, but the Atlas V’s massive Too small compared to its lifting capacity of 7,000 kilograms. It’s like shipping small items in large cardboard boxes, as Amazon’s retail division sometimes does.
“There are very few that are at the mid-rocket level,” he says. Jonathan McDowell at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts. “Amazon wants to sell these right now.”
Amazon says it expects to begin producing full Kuiper satellites in the second half of this year, with launches to begin in the first half of next year, with initial Kuiper services to be rolled out in late 2024. It will eventually deliver internet speeds of up to 1 gigabit per second, comparable to fiber optic broadband.
For this launch, each prototype satellite will carry equipment to test how ground-based users can connect to Kuiper. To prevent future Kuiper giant constellations from becoming a danger to astronomers, one satellite will also test ways to reduce the satellite’s brightness in the night sky, but Amazon hasn’t revealed exactly how this will work. do not have.
chris johnsonSpace law advisers at the US’s Secure World Foundation said there were still questions to be resolved, both regarding the impact of giant constellations on astronomy and the management of such large numbers of satellites in orbit to avoid collisions. ing. “The constellations on Earth are here now, and the train has left the station,” he says. “But that doesn’t mean the game is over. These things can still be regulated.”
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