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.
