Amazon is keen to get its second batch of internet satellites into orbit, but it won’t be happening just yet.
The launch of 27 Project Kuiper satellites was set to take place early Monday afternoon ET at Cape Canaveral in Florida, but just 30 minutes from liftoff, rocket operator United Launch Alliance (ULA) said it was standing down for the day “due to an engineering observation of an elevated purge temperature within the booster engine” on its Atlas V vehicle. In simple terms, this means part of the booster became too hot and needs to be investigated.
ULA said it will release a new launch date just as soon as one is decided.
The rocket had been due to launch last Friday, but poor weather conditions prompted mission planners to shift the date to Monday.
Similar to SpaceX’s established Starlink service, Amazon’s Project Kuiper aims to provide fast, affordable broadband internet to customers globally. It’s particularly keen to serve locations where fiber, cable, or cellular infrastructure is unavailable or unreliable, such as rural and mountainous areas, while the service could also play an important role in disaster zones — something that Starlink has done a number of times in recent years to support emergency and relief efforts.
The company plans to deploy a constellation of 3,236 satellites in low Earth orbit, which will be completed by 2029 at the latest. Before then, Amazon is aiming to launch a high-speed broadband service by the end of this year with around 1,000 satellites, though building the constellation over time will improve network performance and reliability for what the company expects to be a growing customer base.
To deploy its internet satellites, Amazon has secured more than 90 rocket launches with a slew of spaceflight firms that include not only ULA but also ArianeGroup, Blue Origin, and even SpaceX, spending more than $10 billion in launch contracts.
Customers signing up to the Project Kuiper service will be able to choose from three types of user terminals: a compact 7-inch square model for portability (up to 100 Mbps), a standard 11-inch model for households (up to 400 Mbps), and a larger model for enterprises (up to 1 Gbps).
Amazon expects to sell its standard customer terminal for around $400 per unit, which would make it about $50 more expensive than Starlink’s terminal for residential customers.
Interested in watching the launch? Digital Trends has everything you need to know.
After 13 suborbital test flights and more than $15 billion in development costs, SpaceX's Starship has finally reached orbit. The 407-foot megarocket, the most powerful ever built, lifted off from Starbase, Texas, on Monday and delivered its first real payload on it's 14th attempt. The celebration came with an asterisk, though, since SpaceX had to cut the planned 10-hour mission to roughly three hours.
https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/2104601695711904180
SpaceX is finally ready to give Starship its biggest test yet. The company says the massive rocket's 14th test flight is scheduled for September 22, when it will attempt to put the upper stage into Earth orbit for the first time. The launch is currently pending regulatory approval, with a 75-minute window opening at 7:15 a.m. CT.
Starship has 26 Starlink satellites to deliver
For decades, humanity has looked up at the Moon and wondered what it would be like to live on it. Think sprawling cities, factories, research centers, and permanent human settlements. Unfortunately, there is one fairly fundamental problem with that vision.
A new study published in Frontiers in Space Technologies argues that even the Moon's potentially enormous reserves of frozen water may be nowhere near enough to support city-sized populations sustainably. Researchers Martin Elvis and Jonathan McDowell estimate that the permanently shadowed regions near the lunar poles could contain roughly one billion tons of water. It sounds like an extraordinary amount until you put a million thirsty humans next to it.