Amazon’s Project Kuiper has announced it will finally launch its first batch of LEO satellites next week, almost one year behind schedule, with more launches already booked and commercial services expected to kick off later this year.
According to a blog post from Amazon on Wednesday, United Launch Alliance (ULA) will launch the first 27 Kuiper satellites on an Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida on April 9. The satellites, launched under the mission name “KA-01” (Kuiper Atlas 1), will be placed in orbit around 450 kilometres above the Earth.
The initial Kuiper constellation will comprise over 3,200 LEO satellites. Amazon said it has secured more than 80 launches to deploy the remaining satellites over the next few years, including seven more Atlas V launches and 38 Vulcan Centaur launches with ULA, plus an additional 30+ launches with Arianespace, Amazon-owned Blue Origin and SpaceX.
Amazon has been testing its LEO broadband service on two prototype satellites launched in October 2023. The company said the satellites being launched this Wednesday have been upgraded “to improve the performance of every system and sub-system on board, including phased array antennas, processors, solar arrays, propulsion systems, and optical inter-satellite links.”
Amazon added that the satellites are also coated in a dielectric mirror film that scatters reflected sunlight to help make them less visible to ground-based astronomers.
“We’ve done extensive testing on the ground to prepare for this first mission, but there are some things you can only learn in flight, and this will be the first time we’ve flown our final satellite design and the first time we’ve deployed so many satellites at once,” said Project Kuiper VP Rajeev Badyal in the blog post. “No matter how the mission unfolds, this is just the start of our journey, and we have all the pieces in place to learn and adapt as we prepare to launch again and again over the coming years.”
Project Kuiper was originally scheduled to start launching satellites in the first half of 2024. In July that year, the launch date was pushed back to October 2024, and then again to early 2025 after ULA bumped the Amazon launch to prioritise two missions for the US Space Force.
According to Space News, Amazon has little room for further delays, as its FCC licence requires it to deploy half the constellation by July 2026, and the full constellation by July 2029.
Meanwhile, Amazon said it has already begun shipping and processing satellites for the KA-02 mission, which will also use a ULA Atlas V rocket and launch from Cape Canaveral, although no launch date has been given.