Amazon’s Project Kuiper, the space-based broadband service that will compete with Elon Musk’s Starlink, is planning to launch its first batch of satellites next week.
The project, which has been in development since 2019, has been approved to deploy a constellation of 3,236 satellites into low-Earth orbit by the US Federal Communications Commission, although it has only launched two prototype satellites to date.
Next week, a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket will take off from a Florida launchpad to deploy 27 satellites at an altitude of 450km above Earth. The satellite payload will be the heaviest that the Atlas V rocket has ever flown.
Amazon said that once the full constellation is in orbit, Project Kuiper will deliver high-speed, low-latency internet to virtually any location on the planet. It has so far secured more than 80 launches to deploy the initial constellation, with each one adding dozens of new satellites to the network.
“We’ve designed some of the most advanced...