The e-commerce giant – Amazon plans to provide internet from space using 3,236 satellites in low Earth orbit – Project Kuiper.
The company signed a multibillion-dollar contract — the biggest deal in the history of the commercial space industry — for launches of its Kuiper satellites with 3 different bodies: Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin, United Launch Alliance and Europe’s Arianespace.
“In many ways, it’s a response and a competition to Elon Musk and SpaceX with its Starlink network,” said news reporter Michael Sheetz. Starlink already has about 2,000 satellites in orbit.
Amazon is yet to launch a satellite, but it could be a big player in the game.
“The satellite communications market is one that’s valued at a few tens of billions of dollars. No one in this industry believes that it’s a one-system-take-all kind of environment. We expect to see at least two and probably more constellations go forward, serving not only the residential consumer, but any type of business or organization that relies on internet connectivity,” said Caleb Henry – Senior Analyst at Quilty Analytics.
“Amazon is known as the everything company, and it’s hard to have an everything company without internet. “Amazon’s fastest-growing segment has been its AWS cloud service. And in support of that, they’ve built out a tremendous amount of internet infrastructure, whether it’s data centers or fiber,” said Henry.
