TAMPA, Fla. — United Launch Alliance launched two prototypes Oct. 6 for the greater than 3,200 Project Kuiper broadband satellites Amazon plans to construct and deploy over the following six years.
An Atlas 5 rocket carrying the satellites lifted off 2:06 p.m. Eastern from Space Launch Complex-41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, and dropped them off in low Earth orbit about 18 minutes later.
The launch was delayed six minutes following an alert that its trajectory would have passed too close to a different object already in space.
It was the 99th launch of an Atlas 5, and the eighth time the rocket has flown in its 501 configuration after debuting April 2010.
It’s also the twentieth mission the Boeing-Lockheed Martin three way partnership has performed for a business client, out of 158 launches since ULA’s formation in 2006.
Amazon said its mission operations center in Redmond, Washington, confirmed first contact with KuiperSat-2 at 2:43 p.m. Eastern, and first contact was achieved with KuiperSat-1 nine minutes later.
KuiperSat-1 and KuiperSat-2 enable Amazon to check space and ground systems for Project Kuiper from an altitude of 500 kilometers before full-scale production launches start next yr.
The prototypes were originally slated to fly by late last yr with ABL Space Systems, before the rocket developer’s RS1 vehicle suffered setbacks. They were moved to the debut launch of ULA’s Vulcan Centaur, which was resulting from fly earlier in 2023, just for that rocket to get caught up in development delays.
ULA said following the Amazon mission that its next launch can be for Vulcan, set to launch no sooner than December.
Amazon has booked eight of the 17 Atlas 5 rockets remaining before ULA transitions to Vulcan.
The corporate has also reserved 38 Vulcan flights, 18 Ariane 6 launches from Arianespace, and as much as 27 Recent Glenn missions from Blue Origin — owned by Amazon’s billionaire founder Jeff Bezos.
Ariane 6 and Recent Glenn are also experiencing significant development delays, and, like Vulcan, have yet to launch.
During a Sept. 11 panel at Euroconsult’s World Satellite Business Week in Paris, executives from ULA, Arianespace, and Blue Origin said they will still meet Amazon’s deployment schedule despite their rocket delays.
Amazon has to deploy not less than half of its proposed 3,236 satellites by July 2026 under terms of its Federal Communication Commission license, and the remaining satellites three years later.
Series of tests
Amazon has released few details in regards to the Project Kuiper satellites it plans to construct at production facilities in Kirkland, Washington.
Analysts expect full-sized Project Kuiper spacecraft will are available at greater than 500 kilograms for a Ka-band network looking for to fulfill the broadband needs of consumer, enterprise, and government customers worldwide.
The corporate unveiled three prototype antennas in March, starting from the scale of Amazon’s Kindle ebook reader that guarantees hastens to 100 megabits per second, to a tool 48 centimeters by 76 centimeters across able to as much as 1 gigabit per second.
The plan is for Kuiper-1 and Kuiper-2 to check space-based systems that can be used on operational spacecraft, including how they connect with terminals and the bottom infrastructure needed to support them.
“That is Amazon’s first time putting satellites into space, and we’re going to learn an incredible amount no matter how the mission unfolds,” Project Kuiper vp of technology Rajeev Badyal said in an Oct. 3 blog post in regards to the launch.
The corporate said it plans to actively de-orbit each satellites following their mission, before they might naturally burn up within the Earth’s atmosphere in an uncontrolled descent, but didn’t provide details.
Initial production satellites are on the right track to launch in the primary half of 2024, Amazon added, enabling beta tests with early business customers by the top of that yr.