Brief Glimpse at Amazon’s Kuiper Broadband Satellites
May 5th, 2025Perplexity thinks Amazon’s launch cost is something like 3X higher than Starlink’s.
It’s going to be interesting to see how Bezos will try to compete with Starlink, which is already fully operational with millions of customers.
Via: Ars Technica:
Amazon requested ULA end the official live broadcast of the launch around five minutes into the flight, barely a quarter of the way through the Atlas V’s 18-minute climb into orbit. After reaching orbit, the Centaur upper stage released the Kuiper satellites three at a time from a cylindrical carrier module fastened to the forward end of the rocket.
All of these milestones occurred out of public view, a policy of secrecy similar to the launch of a clandestine military spy satellite. Of course, commercial companies like ULA have no obligation to broadcast their launches at all, and there’s no requirement for Amazon to show pictures of its satellites.
The video Amazon released Friday of the Kuiper deployments is fuzzy, and the finer details of the satellites are unseen. However, it’s clear enough to make out their basic design.
The Kuiper satellites are trapezoidal in shape. With their solar arrays folded up for launch, they look much like OneWeb’s satellites, and a lot different from Starlinks, which have a flatter design to stack one on top of another inside SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket.
