The deal includes two veteran rocket makers – United Launch Alliance, a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin, and European firm Arianespace – as well as Blue Origin, the rocket company run by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, still are working on developing rockets capable of reaching orbit.
Bezos remains Amazon’s executive chairman.
The contracts cover a total of 83 launches, which Amazon calls one of the largest commercial launch deals ever signed. The launch will take place in about five years. All three rockets that Amazon plans to use for these missions have not yet entered service but are expected to become operational later this year or 2023. Financial details were not disclosed.
In an interview with
CNBC Third, Dave Limp, Amazon’s Senior Vice President of Devices and Services, only said that the contracts would cost Amazon “billions of dollars.”
He added that the company’s goal is to launch several test satellites into orbit within the next year. And, if all goes to plan, Amazon will deploy at least half of the Project Kuiper constellation, or more than 1,600 satellites, by 2026. But the company could start commercial services with just a few hundred satellites. , said Limp. He declined to discuss how much the service might cost consumers.
“We still have a lot of work ahead of us, but the team has continued to hit milestone after milestone in every aspect of our satellite system,” Limp said in a statement. .
Notably absent from the list of suppliers is Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Although SpaceX has worked to
dominate In the commercial launch industry with reusable rockets, Amazon’s space-based internet business, called Project Kuiper, is expected to compete directly with SpaceX’s own satellite internet business, Starlink . Starlink is
good front of Project Kuiper and others, as the company has deployed more than 2,000 satellites and contracted more than 145,000 customers around the world, SpaceX said in January.
Its
not rarehowever, for a space company to launch a satellite on a competitor’s rocket. Notable SpaceX signed a satellite launch agreement for
OneWeb is based in the UK, is building another constellation of internet satellites in low Earth orbit, an orbital region extending about 1,200 miles from the Earth’s surface. (OneWeb made that deal after a previous launch contract, which involved the use of Russian missiles,
was canceled during the Ukraine war.)
Bezos and Musk, however, are said to have a particularly strained relationship, with Musk often publicizing his regrets about Bezos on social media.
Twitter and their companies engaged in intense competition for the top position
contract with NASA and the US military.
Amazon’s Kuiper Project Joined
developed silently for many years. Federal regulators have given
approval for the company to launch its satellite in 2020, and several specific updates have been shared since then.
Under the agreement announced Tuesday, Arianespace, which has an operational orbital rocket but will plan to use the upcoming Ariane 6 rocket for Project Kuiper launches, has signed an agreement for 18 mission.
ULA gets the majority of the deal, with plans for 38 launches. ULA will use the Vulcan Centaur rocket, which was slated to fly in early 2022 but has been delayed due to development progress with the engine it will use – the BE-4 engine, which will be built by Bezos’ Blue Origin. Centaur Vulcan can fly for the first time
later this year.
Blue Origin will also use BE-4 for its New Glenn rocket, which is
currently planning to go into operation in 2023. Amazon signed a deal for 12 launches of that vehicle when it’s ready to fly.
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