Amazon is less than a week away from the first launch to assemble its satellite internet constellation, called Project Kuiper.
It plans to send 27 of its satellites into low Earth orbit on a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas 5 rocket. Launch is scheduled for Wednesday, April 9, during a three-hour window that opens at 12 p.m. EDT (1600 UTC).
“We’ve designed some of the most advanced communications satellites ever built, and every launch is an opportunity to add more capacity and coverage to our network,” said Rajeev Badyal, vice president of Project Kuiper, in a news release. “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.
“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.”
Amazon hasn’t released many details about the individual satellites.
In a February interview with Gary Wentz, ULA vice president of Government and Commercial Programs, said that the upcoming launch for Amazon, dubbed Kuiper 1 by ULA and Kuiper Atlas 1 (KA-01) by Amazon, was the first of many planned for the year.
“We have quite a few Kuiper Atlases planned this year, as well as Kuiper Vulcans,” Wentz said. “I do know that the Amazon guys are tracking the number of spacecraft they’re going to put up in total because they have different criteria to meet. But I don’t really have a good number as to how many spacecraft they’ll end up putting on orbit in ’25.”
ULA President and CEO Tory Bruno said that a full batch for an Atlas 5 rocket is 27. Meanwhile a Vulcan rocket can carry 45 in one flight.
Spaceflight Now reached out to Amazon to ask about their anticipated number of launches in 2025, along with several other questions, but did not hear back before publication.
Wentz said in February that the first Vulcan rocket intended to carry Kuiper satellites was already in production. Amazon said its second launch will be on another Atlas rocket, so it will likely be at least late summer or early fall before a Vulcan rocket launches its first Kuiper satellites.
“We’re prepared to have both vehicles ready and then it’ll come down to Kuiper managing how many spacecraft they want to put up and on what vehicle,” Wentz said. “So they have a lot of flexibility.”
Clock is ticking
In a 2020 Federal Communications Commission (FCC) document authorizing Kuiper Systems LLC, Kuiper proposed to operate 3,236 satellites in 98 orbital planes. These would operate at altitudes of 590 km, 610 km and 630 km. The 27 satellites that are launching with the Kuiper 1 mission will head into a circular orbit at 630 km.
“According to Kuiper, the system will be deployed in five phases, and service will begin once the first 578 satellites are launched,” the document stated.
The FCC described the spread of the constellation in a footnote:
- 590 km – 28 orbital planes, 28 satellites per plane (784 total)
- 610 km – 42 orbital planes, 36 satellites per plane (1,296 total)
- 630 km – 34 orbital planes, 34 satellites per plane (1,156 total)
Amazon will need to pick up the pace with the launch of its satellites. To meet FCC requirements, Amazon needs to launch and operate 50 percent of its satellites by July 30, 2026.
The FCC also stated: “Kuiper must launch the remaining space stations necessary to complete its authorized service constellation, place them in their assigned orbits, and operate each of them in accordance with the authorization no later than July 30, 2029.”
The FCC said if Amazon doesn’t meet this obligation, it “may result in Kuiper’s authorization being reduced to the number of satellites in use on the milestone date.” In order to meet its goal it has to launch 1,618 satellites by the end of July 2026, which would averages out to a little more than 95 satellites launched per month.
Amazon purchased nine Atlas 5 rockets to launch Kupier satellites in 2021. A year later, it went on to book more launches: 38 on Vulcan, 18 launches on the Ariane 6 from Arianespace and between 12 to 27 New Glenn vehicles from Blue Origin. Under investor pressure, in December 2023, Amazon signed a contract with SpaceX for three flights on Falcon 9 rockets.
The first launch of any type of Kuiper satellite was back in October 2023 when the company launched a pair of prototype satellites on a demonstration flight, dubbed Protoflight. That mission flew on an Atlas 5 rocket, leaving eight remaining available for full production launches.
Those first two demonstration Kuiper satellites were originally slated to launch on the inaugural flight of ULA’s Vulcan rocket, but they were removed from the manifest and placed on an Atlas 5 instead to launch sooner.
In October 2023, the same month it launched the Protoflight mission, Amazon said it expected to provide service from its Project Kuiper constellation “by the end of 2024.”
Although Amazon hasn’t released many details about the individual satellites, it said it had made notable design changes since the Protoflight and “improved the performance of every system and sub-system on board, including phased array antennas, processors, solar arrays, propulsion systems, and optical inter-satellite links.”
It remains to be seen how many launches Amazon will achieve before the end of 2025.
The SpaceX launches were due to commence in mid-2025, but the Amazon declined to answer if this was still the plan.
Arianespace’s Ariane 6 rocket is not scheduled to fly again until August when it launches the MetOp-SG-A1 satellite for the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT). Arianespace said it plans to launch three more Ariane 6 missions before the end of the year, but hasn’t publicized its full manifest.
Meanwhile, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, which received 12 launches for Kuiper and an option for up to 15 more, was just cleared for its return to flight, following the loss of its first stage booster during its inaugural launch in January. Its next flight is set for “late spring,” but a payload has not yet been announced.
Bezos told Aviation Week prior to the NG-1 mission launch that he expected Blue Origin to fly “six to eight times this year.” It’s unclear if Blue Origin has revised that estimate due to the January launch mishap.
Amazon has also not disclosed how many of its Kuiper satellites can fly on Arianespace’s Ariane 6, Blue Origin’s New Glenn or SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket. The company said after the launch of the Kuiper 1 mission it aims to “continue to increase our production, processing, and deployment rates as we prepare to begin delivering service to customers.”
The current rate of production has also not been announced.
First of the year
The Kuiper 1 launch on Atlas 5 will be ULA’s first orbital mission of 2025. The announcement on Wednesday came less than a week after the U.S. Space Force announced that the Vulcan rocket was certified to launch national security missions.
The first Vulcan launch as part of ULA’s National Security Space Launch (NSSL) Phase 2 contract will be the USSF-106 mission, which is slated to launch “this summer.”
As recently as March 12, Bruno said that he expects ULA to launch “around a dozen times” before the year is through, adding that ULA “can fly more, if satellites show up and obviously, if there aren’t any satellites, we’ll fly less.”
Including the Kuiper 1 mission, ULA has eight Kuiper launches remaining using Atlas 5 rockets. Beyond that, there are six Atlas 5 rockets set aside for the launches of Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft as part of the Commercial Crew Program and one other for Viasat.
“I would like to be hitting our baseline tempo before the end of the year,” Bruno said. “So, that would be two a month and then next year, it’ll be more like 20.”
After USSF-106, ULA’s next NSSL mission will be USSF-87. ULA has the Vulcan boosters for both of these mission already in Florida, but the launch date will be driven in part by the readiness of the U.S. Space Force and its payloads.
NASA and Boeing are also working to determine when the next Starliner mission will take place. They are planning a robust spring and summer of thruster testing at the White Sands Space Facility in New Mexico, which will determine both the timeline and whether the next flight will carry astronauts or not.
source: spaceflightnow.com