Late in 2023, Amazon bought three launches from SpaceX to carry its Project Kuiper satellites on Falcon 9 rockets, starting in 2025. The customer was Jeff Bezos’s company. The supplier was Elon Musk’s, and Musk is the man Bezos has spent years racing in space.
Under the hood, the logic is blunt. Kuiper is a satellite internet service meant to compete with SpaceX’s Starlink, and it needs more than 3,000 satellites in orbit. For several years the project struggled to find rockets to put them there. Amazon had already signed three launch partners, United Launch Alliance (ULA), Arianespace and Bezos’s own Blue Origin, for over 90 Kuiper missions, the Observer reported. The trouble is that Blue Origin’s New Glenn is slow to take shape, and neither ULA nor Arianespace had built the new rockets Kuiper was counting on. The only working vehicle Amazon could use was ULA’s Atlas V, which carried a pair of demo satellites up in October.
Four years, one demo mission
Kuiper was announced in 2019, around the time SpaceX flew its first operational batch of Starlink satellites. The gap since then is hard to ignore. Starlink has about 4,500 working satellites in orbit and more than two million paying users. Kuiper has launched one demo mission.
A lawsuit and a plan
The SpaceX contract came months after a Cleveland pension fund sued Amazon’s board. The fund claimed directors “acted in bad faith” by giving most Kuiper launches to unbuilt rockets without considering SpaceX, currently the largest launch provider in the U.S. The suit suggested Bezos’s low opinion of Musk was one reason SpaceX was passed over. Amazon denied it.
Bezos appears to want a vertically integrated operation, with Blue Origin rockets launching Amazon satellites, much as SpaceX rockets launch Starlink. He has been placing people accordingly. In September, Amazon’s board, which Bezos chairs, named Dave Limp, the former head of Project Kuiper, as Blue Origin’s new CEO.
Musk, for his part, was gracious. Speaking to Andrew Ross Sorkin at the New York Times Dealbook Summit, he said he admired Bezos’s ambitions and welcomed the competition. “I actually agree with a lot of Jeff’s motivations,” Musk said. “If there was a button I could press that would delete Blue Origin, I wouldn’t press it.” He added that he would suggest Bezos “spend more time on it, but it’s up to him.”
As ever, the detail that matters is who owns the rocket. Amazon said it planned to launch Kuiper satellites in batches in the first half of 2024 and start service in some areas later that year.
