396 satellites now in orbit

Blue Origin vows faster launchpad rebuild after explosion

The Amazon logo. [Reuters]
The Amazon logo. [Reuters]

Amazon said its low-Earth orbit satellite internet service, Leo, will launch initial service this year, setting up a direct competition with Elon Musk's SpaceX and its Starlink network.

Amazon launched 29 low-Earth orbit satellites aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket at 12:30 a.m. Eastern time Wednesday, successfully placing them in orbit. The deployment brings the total number of Amazon satellites in low-Earth orbit to 396.

Melissa Wall, Amazon's head of Leo launch systems, said the mission was the final flight for the Atlas V rocket, with future launches to be carried out by the larger Vulcan rocket. "This will allow us to rapidly expand coverage after we launch initial service later this year," she said.

Chris Weber, Amazon's Leo general manager, said on X, formerly Twitter, that the company had "more than enough launches completed for initial service this year."

Amazon established its satellite internet project under the name Project Kuiper in 2019, then rebranded it last year to Leo, an acronym for low-Earth orbit.

Amazon began offering Leo's enterprise service to select businesses last November but has yet to launch a consumer-facing service. Once Leo goes fully live, it will compete with Starlink, the market leader operated by Elon Musk's space company SpaceX.

Starlink, which launched in 2015, has built a constellation of more than 10,000 satellites and amassed more than 10 million subscribers. Amazon plans to deploy more than 7,700 satellites, but its launch cadence has lagged due to limited rocket capacity.

That bottleneck is expected to persist, particularly after a New Glenn rocket operated by Blue Origin — the space company of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos — exploded during a static-fire test in May, damaging launchpad infrastructure at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman estimated the launchpad would not be restored until 2028.

Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp recently said the company plans to cut that timeline by switching to a hybrid horizontal-vertical launch configuration it had already been developing, rather than rebuilding the existing pad.


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