Amazon’s Project Kuiper satellite network streamed its first video and facilitated its first online sale during a monthlong series of orbital tests that the company says achieved a “100% success rate.”
The performance of the two prototype satellites, known as KuiperSat 1 and 2, validated Amazon’s satellite design and will open the way for mass production to begin in earnest next month at a factory in Kirkland, Wash., said Rajeev Badyal, vice president of technology for Project Kuiper.
“It’s been an incredible success for the team, for Kuiper, and partly because everything we did went like clockwork,” Badyal said. “There were no fires to fight, so to speak. In some ways, the team made it look very easy. As you know very well, these things are extremely difficult to do. But everything we built, all the designs are working as designed, and the results we’re getting are nominal or better.”
The prototype satellites were launched into low Earth orbit from Florida on Oct. 6 atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket, and after testing the satellites’ maneuverability, Amazon verified end-to-end network functionality last week. Further tests will be conducted in the months ahead while satellite production ramps up, Amazon said.
Project Kuiper is designed to provide affordable broadband internet access from above for tens of millions of people around the world who are underserved.
It’s been only four years since Kuiper came into the public spotlight — and Amazon is far behind SpaceX’s rival Starlink satellite network, which already has more than 2 million subscribers. But Project Kuiper aims to take advantage of synergies with Amazon’s other business lines, ranging from online retail sales to Amazon Prime Video and Amazon Web Services.
The tests conducted over the past month served as a demonstration of those synergies as well as confirmation that Project Kuiper’s hardware, software and ground-based infrastructure are on the right track.
Most of the tests were run from Amazon’s test site in McAllen, Texas, and involved satellite passes lasting from 30 to 120 seconds. Amazon sent data traffic in both directions from the internet over an AWS fiber-optic connection to the network’s ground gateway station, up to the satellites, and then down to a customer terminal at the test site.
One test involved logging into an Amazon Prime account through the satellite connection, searching for a product (specifically, a set of National Geographic Air Rocket Racers), adding it to the cart and checking out. In another test, engineers logged into Amazon Prime Video via satellite and began watching “A Million Miles Away,” a movie about NASA astronaut Jose Hernandez, in 4K resolution.
Yet another demonstration, shown in an Amazon video, involved dialing up the Kuiper mission operations center in Redmond, Wash., for a two-way satellite video call on the Amazon Chime videoconferencing platform. “Nice job, team,” an engineer in Redmond told engineers in McAllen. “Now let’s go build some more satellites.”
The tests also validated the technologies used at Project Kuiper’s telemetry, tracking and control stations in locales such as Hawaii and Mauritius.
Badyal shied away from giving specific metrics about signal latency or data transmission rates, but he said the satellite video call met today’s online standards.
“What I can share with you is, the call was just like you and I are having a conversation,” Badyal told GeekWire from Redmond over an Amazon Chime hook-up. “It was a real-time call, and you would see no difference between how you and are talking right now.”
The prototype satellites were built at Project Kuiper’s Redmond headquarters, but thousands of production-grade satellites are due to be turned out at Amazon’s 172,000-square-foot factory in Kirkland. Initially, some subsystems would continue to be built at the Redmond facility, and then go to Kirkland for final integration. Kirkland will become the primary site for manufacturing by next spring, Badyal said.
“Everything is pretty much all done in that building, and we’re just bringing up the capability to start making some of the subsystems that we need to get built over there,” he said.
Amazon will need 3,236 satellites to fill out the full constellation in low Earth orbit, and under the terms of its license from the Federal Communications Commission, half of those satellites will have to be in orbit by mid-2026. The rest would have to be launched by 2029. To meet that schedule, Project Kuiper plans to produce up to four satellites per day at the Kirkland factory.
Badyal said the past month’s Protoflight tests confirmed that the design for those satellites will work. “You can do vacuum chambers, thermal chambers, all those kinds of testing here,” he said. “You can do all the shaking of the satellites, shock testing, vibration testing. Everything gets done here. But the ultimate proof of that is going through the launch process, launching it in space, and then seeing the results and seeing how things work.”
The first production-grade satellites are to be launched early next year, with beta testing scheduled to begin in the second half of 2024. Amazon has reserved scores of launch slots with United Launch Alliance, Blue Origin and Arianespace, and Badyal said the launch vehicles for the first production launches already have been selected. (He declined to identify the rockets, however.)
The beta testing will be conducted with select partners including Verizon and Vodafone. “Our customers have to learn our system, how it’s going to operate,” Badyal explained. “They also have to learn the things they need to build in order to use our capabilities. They will test their network capabilities, and eventually it will lead to [making] calls, depending on what their use case is.”
Amazon said additional enterprise, telecommunications and government entities can register their interest in participating in the Project Kuiper pilot program through early 2024 by sending email to kuiper-interest@amazon.com.
