Amazon.com Inc. said the prototype satellites for its Project Kuiper internet venture are operating normally after their first week in orbit.
(Bloomberg) — Amazon.com Inc. said the prototype satellites for its Project Kuiper internet venture are operating normally after their first week in orbit.
The two satellites were drawing power from their solar panels and communicating consistently with Amazon’s terminal on the ground, the company said in a statement Monday. “We’re already learning a lot from this mission that will inform further improvements to our production systems, and the team should be very proud of this milestone,” Rajeev Badyal, the Amazon vice president who leads the Kuiper team, said in the statement.
Amazon launched its two satellites on a United Launch Alliance LLC rocket on Oct. 6 and about five hours later reported it had established contact with them. The company hopes to eventually put some 3,326 satellites into low Earth orbit and use them to beam broadband interent service to the ground below, similar to Starlink, a unit of Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp.
The next phase of Amazon’s current mission will focus on the system’s data network, including testing links to the internet and customer terminal antennas.
More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com
©2023 Bloomberg L.P.