TAMPA, Fla. — Industrial Project Kuiper satellites are entering production next month without design changes after two recently launched prototypes aced end-to-end tests, the broadband constellation’s vp of technology said in an interview.
KuiperSat-1 and KuiperSat-2 successfully demonstrated fiber-like speeds after launching to low Earth orbit last month, Rajeev Badyal told , enabling work to start out on greater than 3,200 production satellites with similar architecture.
He said the tests put Amazon’s constellation plans heading in the right direction to start out launches in the primary half of 2024, enabling beta services later that yr with early partners that include telcos Vodafone and Verizon.
Badyal declined to debate the variety of satellites Project Kuiper goals to have in orbit for these early services, but said they’d be grouped together to present potential customers seamless connectivity in certain areas.
“There’ll be loads of satellites for our chosen customers to start out doing their use case tests on a continuous basis,” Badyal said, equivalent to cellular backhaul.
Demonstrations using Project Kuiper’s prototypes since their launch last month were limited to 30-120-second contact windows because the two satellites omitted a test site in McAllen, Texas.
Although Amazon has not released performance metrics for these tests, Badyal said broadband speeds were comparable with terrestrial networks.
The corporate unveiled three prototype customer terminals early this yr that boast speeds of as much as 1 gigabit per second (Gbps).
Throughout the week of Nov. 5, Amazon sent data traffic in each directions over its space network: from the web over an Amazon-owned fiber network to a ground station, as much as the prototype satellites, after which to a prototype customer terminal in McAllen.
In the primary demonstration, engineers using the satellites logged into an Amazon Prime account, looked for a product on the web retailer’s site, added it to a virtual shopping cart, after which checked out.
Within the second, Badyal said engineers successfully began to buffer after which stream an ultra-high definition (UHD) 4K video to display the network’s high throughput and low latency
The corporate also tested a temporary two-way video call over Amazon Chime between the Texas test site and the corporate’s mission operations center in Redmond, Washington. This test required antennas connecting to satellites from Texas to concurrently send and receive data, routed through terrestrial networks to and from Washington.
“Each component is working as designed,” Badyal added, “All the outcomes are nominal or higher.”
That is an “incredible milestone from Amazon,” he added, which just five years ago didn’t have any internal capability to design and construct satellites.
Although Amazon has now finished core prototype tests, he said the corporate will conduct more experiments to make sure the constellation can hold as much as the pains of space.
“We wish to see what the impact is of radiation on these solar arrays,” he said, “do they degrade or do they modify performance just like what we expect it to be?”
These experiments could take several months, and at the tip Amazon will try and actively de-orbit the spacecraft inside a yr using onboard propulsion that Badyal can also be performing well.
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Amazon will start constructing business satellites at a facility in Kirkland, Washington, and next yr plans to open up a satellite processing facility at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, Florida, to ramp up deployment.
Production satellites can be the identical size because the prototypes and there isn’t any material difference between them, Badyal said, declining to present specifics.
Analysts expect Project Kuiper satellites can be greater than 500 kilograms each, given the multibillion-dollar launch agreement Amazon has signed to make use of heavy-lift launch vehicles from United Launch Alliance (ULA), Arianespace, and Blue Origin.
The successful prototype tests are welcome news for a corporation that must deploy half the constellation — or 1,618 satellites — by July 2026 under deployment rules tied to its Federal Communications Commission license, and the remainder by July 2029.
Amazon also has firm commitments for 77 heavy-lift launch vehicles.
Nevertheless, other than eight upcoming ULA Atlas 5 missions, the remainder depend on rockets which have yet to enter service amid development delays: ULA’s Vulcan Centaur, Blue Origin’s Latest Glenn, and Ariane 6 from Arianespace.