Launch of first Amazon project Kuiper internet satellites is scrubbed

The battle of billionaires in space between Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk is ready to enter a new arena: satellite internet. But the contest will have to wait another day as weather along Florida's Space Coast on Wednesday night interfered with a launch attempt.

Amazon, the company that Bezos started as an online bookseller three decades ago, is now a merchandising behemoth, the owner of the James Bond franchise, a seller of electronic gadgets like Echo smart speakers and one of the most powerful providers of cloud computing.

So perhaps it is not a surprise that Amazon is now launching the first few of thousands of satellites known as Project Kuiper to provide another option for remaining connected in the modern world. The market for beaming high-speed internet to the ground from orbit is currently dominated by Elon Musk's SpaceX rocket company, which operates a similar service, Starlink. Starlink, with thousands of satellites in orbit and more launching nearly every week, already serves several million customers around the world.

Why was the launch postponed?

The first 27 Project Kuiper satellites were scheduled to lift off Wednesday between 7 and 9 pm Eastern time from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. They were to fly on an Atlas V, a rocket made by United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin.

But the flight attempt was dogged by poor weather near the launch site, with rain, wind and cloudy conditions making a liftoff unsafe. After pushing back the launch time several times during the two-hour window, ULA's flight director decided to scrub the flight around 8:41 p.m.

The company is reviewing the next opportunity for a launch.

What is Project Kuiper?

Project Kuiper will be a constellation of internet satellites intended to provide high-speed data connections to almost every point on Earth. Doing this successfully will require thousands of satellites, and Amazon's goal is to operate more than 3,200 in the years to come.

The company will compete with SpaceX's Starlink, a service that was originally marketed primarily to residential customers.

While Kuiper also aims for that market, particularly in remote areas, it will also be integrated with Amazon Web Services, the company's cloud computing offering, which is popular with large corporations and governments around the world. That might make it more attractive to businesses that involve satellite imagery or weather forecasting that not only need to move large amounts of data across the internet, but also to perform calculations on the data.

Ground stations will connect the Kuiper satellites to the web services infrastructure in a manner that could also allow companies to communicate with their own remote equipment. For example, Amazon has suggested that energy companies could use Kuiper to monitor and control remote wind farms or offshore drilling platforms.

In October 2023, two prototype Kuiper satellites were launched to test the technology. Amazon said that the tests were successful. Those prototypes were never meant to serve in the operational constellation, and after seven months they were nudged back into the atmosphere, where they burned up. The company said it has since updated the designs of "every system and subsystem on board."

"There's a big difference between launching two satellites and launching 3,000 satellites," Rajeev Badyal, an Amazon executive in charge of Kuiper, said in a promotional video before the launch.

When will Amazon provide internet service from space?

Amazon told the Federal Communications Commission in 2020 that service would begin after it had deployed its first 578 satellites. The company has said that it expects to connect customers to the internet later this year.

While a fully functional constellation needs thousands of satellites, the company can offer service in specific regions with far fewer in orbit before expanding to more global coverage later on.

The FCC's approval of the constellation came with a requirement that at least half the satellites needed to be deployed by July 30, 2026. Industry analysts say the company could get an extension if it has demonstrated substantial progress by then.

Getting the satellites into orbit also depends on rocket launches occurring on schedule, which can be a problem if enough rockets are not available. Amazon also needs to build hundreds of ground stations, to relay their signals to users.