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At the top sent an Amazon press release this week, there is a strange image. It’s a rocket printed with an American flag and, on top of that, a smiling Amazon logo that goes up into the sky. The company is officially moving its business into space, and Jeff Bezos doesn’t even provide travel.
Amazon recently announced it by the end of next year A startup called ABL Space Systems It would deliver two prototype satellites for the Kuiper Project, the company’s effort to build a low Earth orbit, or LEO, a satellite constellation that can send an Internet connection to Earth. Amazon says it will eventually deploy 3,236 such satellites “that will provide fast and cheap broadband to communities without and without service around the world.” It doesn’t hurt that becoming a space-based Internet service provider can help grow the company’s cloud computing business, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Amazon says they are satellites. He will work with Verizon To provide LTE and 5G service to hard-to-reach places.
It’s hard to discuss the idea of getting more people online. In some parts of the world, broadband access it is a human right. But if you’re concerned about Amazon’s growing dominance over everything, it seems horrible that one of the world’s most powerful companies will launch satellites into space and soon divert internet traffic to the entire planet. In addition, thanks to AWS, the new satellite Internet business will be a success. Babak Beheshti, dean of the University of New York’s Institute of Engineering and Computer Science, he told me last year“Amazon is basically going to be its biggest customer to really prepare the pump for revenue.”
But looking at the history of telecommunications monopolies on Earth here, it may not be so bad for more companies to join an Internet space race.
“Increased competition in the market in the coming years is likely to lead to increased innovation in service quality and, at best, lower prices,” said Mark Buell, vice president of the North American region of the Internet Society. , An international organization for the development and open use of the Internet.
Amazon is not alone in its mission to create a fast and robust Internet service through satellite constellations. Starlink, a SpaceX project, it already has more than 1,700 satellites In low Earth orbit, and the company says It has about 90,000 people He is currently testing the service, each paying $ 99 a month (plus $ 499 for a parabolic commission) for the privilege. OneWeb, that British company came out of failure a year ago It now has more than 350 satellites in orbit, about half of all he predicts for his constellation.
The idea behind all these services is pretty simple when it comes to space things. A ground station with a fiber connection sends data to the constellation of satellites and the satellites return them to customers. Although they literally go back and forth in space, connections can also be fast. Project Kuiper says its prototype It provides a speed of 400 Mbps, much faster than Average U.S. broadband speed. Since connectivity comes from the sky, internet service can be achieved almost anywhere on the planet without the need to connect cables in the mountains, under the ocean, in the jungle, or anywhere in the remote location. Amazon itself could be in a unique position to do this particularly well.
“Providing telecommunications services is more than just launching satellites into space,” Buell said. “Infrastructure needs to be on the ground. Amazon has made significant investments in fiber optic cables to connect its data centers, and most importantly, Amazon is doing an excellent job in logistics, which will be needed to manage more than 3,200 satellites.
Putting more people online is in itself a completely valid goal for Amazon, but again, the company’s intentions can extend beyond that. Last year, AWS construction of six ground stations was completed as part of a new initiative to provide its customers with easier access to control satellite communications and to process satellite data. It’s called business AWS ground station, of course, and soon it looks like Amazon will have its own satellites in orbit, announcing any services that AWS decides to offer in the future.
It is not a scandal that Amazon would launch the Kuiper Project not only to sell Internet service to customers, but also to promote its AWS offering. The commercial space industry is in its infancy, and inventing basic logistics for launching rockets and satellites into orbit and experimenting with what is possible has many advantages. That’s what Jeff Bezos has been up to since he resigned as CEO of the company he founded earlier this year. His space company Blue Origin recently He announced plans to build a “mixed-use business park” Orbits that would rent parts of a space station for commercial use. A stimulating satellite could be put on the network by the time the International Space Station retires, probably by the end of this decade.
Meanwhile, Elon Musk has said he wants to pay for Starlink’s income from his Starship project and missions to colonize other planets. Millionaire he said in 2019 The space-based broadband business is “a key step in establishing a self-sustaining city on Mars and a foundation on the moon”. Starship has already been selected Artemis mission vehicle, Which is intended to take humans to the moon in 2024.
But neither SpaceX nor Blue Origin will bring Amazon’s new satellites into space. It seems that the California-based startup ABL Space Systems, which specializes in bringing smaller charges into orbit on cheaper rockets, has offered Amazon an offer. ABL Space Systems, which he has not yet fired a rocket, says it could put nearly 1.5 tons of payload into low Earth orbit on its RS1 rocket, the same one that will carry Amazon Kuiper satellites, $ 12 million for each launch. A shot of the SpaceX Falcon 9 It can cost $ 62 million. And Blue Origin seems to be more focused when celebrities are thrown into space.
What makes Project Kuiper and its competitors stand out has little to do with whether rockets fly or go to Mars, nor whether Amazon is launching a new business in space. For many, the success of these projects could mean the difference between having access to the internet and not having one. Today, at least 21 million Americans you have no access Quality bandwidth, according to the FCC, means children who can’t access online education tools and patients who can’t access telemedicine, among many other things. So if Amazon wants to put more people online, well, there are a lot of benefits for a lot of people. And for Amazon, a lot of potential new customers.
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