Elon Musk’s Starlink sees its first major challenge – from Jeff Bezos ...Middle East

Amazon is poised to launch its first satellites into space to provide global broadband internet in the tech giant’s quest to build a substantial constellation of spacecraft to challenge Elon Musk’s Starlink.

The first 27 satellites for the Jeff Bezos’s Project Kuiper internet network will launch from Cape Canaveral in Florida on Wednesday from an Atlas 5 rocket.

Eventually, the tech giant aims to have a network of more than 3,200 satellites in space, designed to deliver internet access worldwide, including to remote and underserved regions such as conflict zones and areas affected by natural disasters.

The $10bn (£7.8bn) project is expected to take several years to complete but Amazon aims to branch into the UK internet market after Project Kuiper was approved by regulator Ofcom.

“It’s important symbolically to show Amazon has a foot in the game now with satellites in orbit,” said Tim Hatt, Head of Research and Consulting at GSMA Intelligence.

“It shows a more broad-based competition across the satellite space now that you have many companies operating in low-Earth orbit.”

Hiring ex-Starlink employees to launch satellite rival

The satellites launching on Wednesday represent a significant upgrade from the two prototype satellites that were successfully tested in October 2023, Amazon has said.

To develop the project, the Bezos-led company hired a team of engineers who had previously worked at Starlink but were dismissed by Musk for allegedly violating company policies.

Amazon started developing its project in 2019 – a year after Starlink’s first launch – but it sees its web services as having a competitive edge over SpaceX with mass-produced “consumer terminals”.

These pizza box-sized antennas that will communicate with Kuiper satellites overhead are intended to cost less than $500 to build, the company has claimed.

SpaceX has already launched more than 7,000 Starlink satellites in space, serving over five million internet users across 125 countries, including providing services for militaries and intelligence agencies.

Notably, Starlink has become essential for communications in war-torn Ukraine, where hospitals and the military rely on it to operate.

Project Kuiper also intends to tap into this market with “high-speed, low-latency internet to virtually any location on the planet”.

Once deployed in space, the satellites will travel at speeds exceeding 17,000 miles per hour (27,359 km/h) in an orbit 392 miles (630 km) above Earth, completing a full orbit approximately every 90 minutes, according to Amazon.

Mobile operators have been partnered with satellite network companies “as a way to extend the reach of their own networks,” said Hatt.

“Ground-based coverage can only get so far before the economics become very challenging to reach 100 per cent coverage,” he said.

“So satellite is seen as a pragmatic way to extend that and kind of have a win-win situation where the customers of the mobile operators are able to get better and extended connectivity, and the satellite partners are able to participate in the revenue share.”

A Starlink terminal pictured in Ukraine (Photo: AFP/Getty Images)

These partnerships between mobile phone and satellite providers are especially valuable in coordinating emergency responses following natural disasters, such as hurricanes and earthquakes, when ground-based infrastructure may be down.

Ending the SpaceX monopoly

The satellite industry has seen “a huge growth in the range of players and the capacity in orbit since Starlink initially filed and then launched the first of its satellites,” Hatt said.

Significant growth has been observed particularly in the capacity of Low Earth Orbits (LEO), the closest of the three main orbital planes where satellites operate, including those of SpaceX and Kuiper.

SpaceX’s Starlink is the dominant force in the field, but it is far from being the only player.

Besides Amazon’s Kuiper, China also plans to launch 13,000 satellites as part of its GuoWang constellation.

Canada’s Telesat is reportedly expected to add 300 and the German start-up Rivada 600 satellites.

The European Union’s Iris project has 170 satellites, while the US military’s Space Development Agency plans to launch 300-500 more.

Satellite networks are increasingly becoming “a strategically important asset as part of a vertically integrated business model,” Hatt said. “Both Starlink and Amazon have that and I think we’re going to see that play out over the coming years.”

Low orbit constellation satellites are a very new technology, noted Joanna Darlington, executive committee member of the satellite telecommunications company Eutelsat Group.

“I mean, it’s only been going for three years. So we’re really at the very beginning of that. And I expect what you will see is more sophisticated technology being embarked on those satellites.”

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