At 7:01 pm in a clear in the night of April, a rocket atlas saw the sky from Cabo Cañaveral, Florida. On board, a different lect that has before: 27 trapezoidal satellites destined for the orbit of the low earth. Your mission? To help Amazon build a new Internet network in the sky.
This marks the official launch of an effort of $ 20 billion called Kuiper projectAmazon’s response to Spacex Starlink. The objective: to deliver fast and affordable internet to remote communities around the world creating a constellation of more than 3,200 satellites that orbit just a few hundred miles on earth.
But while Amazon ambitions point down, to reach isolated schools, rural clinics and disconnected communities, the implications extend both out and up, towards the increasingly full skies over our heads.
A new type of Amazon delivery
“Billions of people around the world do not have reliable access to broadband,” says Amazon. Traditional Internet infrastructure, such as fiber optic cables and wireless towers, is expensive to build and difficult to keep in remote or resistant terrain. Satellite Internet can jump on those obstacles, literally.
Kuiper satellites will orbit between 590 and 630 kilometers (367 to 392 miles) on Earth. To that altitude, they can deliver rapid and low latency connections for video calls, high definition transmission and even online games. Amazon says that his service will support “schools, hospitals, companies, government agencies and others operating in places without reliable connectivity.”
Satellites are part of a complex global rotation system: Earth antennas, fiber optic lines and compact customer terminals that connect directly to users’ homes and devices. The company has promised speeds of up to 400 megabytes per second for its standard terminal, quick enough to rival many Internet services on land.
The company is clear about its motivation. “We feel the responsibility of using our success and scale to help close the digital gap,” he says. But it is also clear that Project Kuiper is not a charity. The Amazon CEO, Andy Jassy, has called it the “Pilar Fourth” of the Company, after retail trade, cloud services and premium.
That ambition coincides with the urgency. Amazon must deploy half of its planned fleet of 3,232-satellite in July 2026 to maintain its license from the Federal Communications Commission of the United States.
So Amazon is in a race to make as many releases as possible. The company has reserved space in more than 80 supplier rockets such as Arianespace, United Launch Alliance (ULA) and even its main rival, Spacex.
A sky full of people
The biggest Amazon competition is also its biggest warning signal.
Spacex Starlink, launched in 2019, already has more than 7,300 satellites in orbit and more than 5 million subscribers. Your network is growing rapidly, with new satellites thrown almost weekly. This has transformed the orbit of the Low Earth, and not without consequences.
“Every day is an unprecedented territory,” a space debris expert at Southampton told Hugh Lewis. American scientist. Starlink satellites only now perform 50,000 automated collision avoidance maneuvers every six months.
Amazon has not announced if Kuiper’s satellites will have similar systems. But experts say that the cumulative effect of so many multiple companies (Spacex, Amazon, Oneweb, China’s Qianfan) could trigger “tens or even hundreds of millions” of nearby approaches per year. And finally, a collision can be inevitable.
The 2009 accident between a American Iridium satellite and a missing Russian one produced thousands of debris fragments, many still in orbit. Each fragment, even as small as a paint chip, travels at speeds high enough to disable the spacecraft. Victoria Samsón de la Secure World Foundation warns: “It will be extremely complicated to operate in low earth orbit.”
Then there is the question of what all these satellites are doing to heaven itself.
Astronomers say that their work is being interrupted by the satellite paths, cold stripes that appear in the images of the telescopes. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, ready to scan the night sky with unprecedented details, could have a third of its images fogged by satellite interference.
“It seems horrible to me,” says astronomer Samantha Lawler. “All disadvantages are going on, and there is still no regulation.”
Satellites can even interfere with astronomy radio and alter the visual character of the night sky. The International Astronomical Union recommends that satellites remain higher than magnitude 7: Visibility of bare eyes. Spacex has taken some steps to mitigate its satellites, however, the shine state of Kuiper’s satellites is still unknown.
Multimillionaire space career, episode 2
If the Amazon deployment has a sensation of cape and dagger, that is not an accident.
The company has been surprisingly secret about Project Kuiper. Until recently, he even retained basic images of the satellites. The live broadcast of the first operational launch cut only five minutes. He took a 40 -second blurred video published days later for the public to see for the first time: small trapezoidal satellites that moved in the dark of space.
Amazon’s discretion contrasts with Spacex’s high profile deployments. But behind the curtain, Kuiper has been moving quickly. A 2023 prototype mission declared complete success. The company now has Redmond and Kirkland production facilities, Washington, capable of building five satellites per day. A processing site at the Kennedy Space Center will handle the previous integration.
The man who carries this effort, Rajeev Badyal, has a story with Spacex. He was vice president of satellites there until 2018, when Elon Musk fired him for moving too slowly. In a matter of months, he joined Amazon. In LinkedIn publication Badyal called Kuiper’s first operational deployment “a completely nominal beginning” to the mission. “Adrenaline is still high,” he added.
However, despite all his impulse, Kuiper still is left behind Starlink. The 27 satellites launched in April weighed around 1,200 pounds (540 kg) each, heavier than the “V2 mini” star satellites of Spacex. Amazon uses a more traditional implementation method, staggered separations from a dispenser module, instead of Starlink stacked release technique. It is more flexible, but also more bulky, which means less satellites per rocket.
What happens later?
As Kuiper’s satellites rise to their orbital slots, they will join a heavenly ballet that already wobbles at the edge of chaos.
And although the global broadband access is an undeniably noble goal, it is clear that space is entering a new era, one in which its administration can no longer be a late occurrence.
Michelle Hanlon, a space lawyer at the University of Mississippi, expresses it without Rodeos: “We cannot agree on anything in the international community. Eventually, there will be a break point.”
There are no global laws that limit the number of satellites that a company can launch. There is no international organism to supervise orbital traffic. And there is no treaty that governs the satellite brightness, the mitigation of debris or even how long a satellite can pass by dodging another.
For now, Amazon presses forward. Their satellites are directed to the position on the earth, promising the most fast Internet to those who leave the terrestrial infrastructure.
But heaven is no longer empty. And his future, apparently and more and more, belongs to the few who can afford to fill it.
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