Kuiper Systems LLC, commonly known as Project Kuiper, is a subsidiary of

Amazon Amazon most often refers to: * Amazon River, in South America * Amazon rainforest, a rainforest covering most of the Amazon basin * Amazon (company), an American multinational technology company * Amazons, a tribe of female warriors in Greek myth ...

that was established in 2019 to deploy a large

satellite internet constellation A satellite internet constellation is a constellation of artificial satellites providing satellite internet service. In particular, the term has come to refer to a new generation of very large constellations (sometimes referred to as megacon ...

to provide low- latency broadband connectivity. The name Kuiper was a company codename for the project inspired by the

Kuiper belt The Kuiper belt ( ) is a circumstellar disc in the outer Solar System, extending from the orbit of Neptune at 30 astronomical units (AU) to approximately 50 AU from the Sun. It is similar to the asteroid belt, but is far larger—20 times ...

. On July 30, 2020, the

Federal Communications Commission The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is an independent agency of the United States government that regulates communications by radio, television, wire, internet, wi-fi, satellite, and cable across the United States. The FCC maintains j ...

granted Amazon approval to deploy a constellation of 3,236 satellites into

low Earth orbit A low Earth orbit (LEO) is an geocentric orbit, orbit around Earth with a orbital period, period of 128 minutes or less (making at least 11.25 orbits per day) and an orbital eccentricity, eccentricity less than 0.25. Most of the artificial object ...

. Deployment is planned in five phases, and internet service will begin once the first 578 satellites are launched. Under its granted FCC license, Amazon is required to launch and operate half of its satellites no later than July 30, 2026, and must launch and operate the remaining satellites no later than July 30, 2029. Amazon has purchased 92 rocket launches with United Launch Alliance,

ArianeGroup ArianeGroup (formerly Airbus Safran Launchers) is an aerospace company based in France. A joint venture between Airbus and Safran, the company was founded in 2015 and is headquartered in Issy-les-Moulineaux near Paris. It consists of three core ...

, and

Blue Origin Blue Origin Enterprises, L.P. is an American space technology company headquartered in Kent, Washington. The company operates the suborbital New Shepard rocket and the heavy-lift New Glenn rocket. In addition to producing engines for its own ...

(the latter owned by Amazon founder

Jeff Bezos Jeffrey Preston Bezos ( ;; and Robinson (2010), p. 7. ; born January 12, 1964) is an American businessman best known as the founder, executive chairman, and former president and CEO of Amazon, the world's largest e-commerce and clou ...

) for a total of over . In December 2023, the company bought three additional launches from

SpaceX Space Exploration Technologies Corp., commonly referred to as SpaceX, is an America, American space technology company headquartered at the SpaceX Starbase, Starbase development site in Starbase, Texas. Since its founding in 2002, the compa ...

, which operates the competing

Starlink Starlink is a satellite internet constellation operated by Starlink Services, LLC, an international telecommunications provider that is a wholly owned subsidiary of American aerospace company SpaceX, providing coverage to around 130 countries ...

satellite internet constellation.

History

In April 2019, Amazon officials announced that they would fund and deploy Project Kuiper, a large satellite constellation, to provide

broadband internet In telecommunications, broadband or high speed is the wide- bandwidth data transmission that exploits signals at a wide spread of frequencies or several different simultaneous frequencies, and is used in fast Internet access. The transmission m ...

service. Officials said the project would "offer broadband service through partnerships with other companies", including to "tens of millions of people who lack basic access to broadband internet", although it remains unclear whether service will be offered directly to consumers. The president of Kuiper Systems, Rajeev Badyal, was a former vice president of SpaceX's

satellite internet constellation. Fired by

Elon Musk Elon Reeve Musk ( ; born June 28, 1971) is a businessman. He is known for his leadership of Tesla, SpaceX, X (formerly Twitter), and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Musk has been considered the wealthiest person in th ...

in 2018, Badyal soon afterward started Kuiper along with other ex-SpaceX employees. In December 2019, it was reported that Amazon was asking the FCC to waive requirements (e.g., to have applied by 2016) that

and OneWeb had to follow in order to get their large satellite internet constellations licensed. In July 2020, Amazon received FCC authorization to orbit a constellation of 3,236 satellites, provided, among other conditions, that they not interfere with previously authorized satellite ventures. Company officials said they would spend $10 billion on the effort. It was expected to take up to a decade to fully deploy all 3,236 planned satellites. In December 2020, Amazon unveiled a low-cost flat-panel antenna for the Project Kuiper satellites. It is a Ka-band phased-array antenna that is much smaller than traditional designs for antennas that operate at 17–30

GHz The hertz (symbol: Hz) is the unit of frequency in the International System of Units (SI), often described as being equivalent to one event (or Cycle per second, cycle) per second. The hertz is an SI derived unit whose formal expression in ter ...

. The antenna will be ~ in width and is expected to support up to 400 megabits per second of data bandwidth at less than 20% of the cost of traditional state-of-the-art flat-panel antennas. Amazon also announced that they intend to be " launch agnostic" and would not plan to exclusively use launch capacity from

company, but rather were open to launch capability offers from all providers. In April 2021, Amazon announced that it had contracted with ULA for nine launches of Kuiper satellites on

Atlas V Atlas V is an expendable launch system and the fifth major version in the Atlas (rocket family), Atlas launch vehicle family. It was developed by Lockheed Martin and has been operated by United Launch Alliance (ULA) since 2006. Primarily used to ...

launch vehicle A launch vehicle is typically a rocket-powered vehicle designed to carry a payload (a crewed spacecraft or satellites) from Earth's surface or lower atmosphere to outer space. The most common form is the ballistic missile-shaped multistage ...

s from

Cape Canaveral Space Force Station Cape Canaveral Space Force Station (CCSFS) is an installation of the United States Space Force's Space Launch Delta 45, located on Cape Canaveral in Brevard County, Florida. Headquartered at the nearby Patrick Space Force Base, the sta ...

Florida Florida ( ; ) is a U.S. state, state in the Southeastern United States, Southeastern region of the United States. It borders the Gulf of Mexico to the west, Alabama to the northwest, Georgia (U.S. state), Georgia to the north, the Atlantic ...

, and noted that it will "continue to explore all options" for launching the remainder of the satellites. In April 2022, Amazon announced contracts with three launch providers for 83 launches over the next decade. They include 18 launches of the European

Ariane 6 Ariane 6 is a European expendable launch system developed for the European Space Agency (ESA) and manufactured by a consortium of European companies, led by the prime contractor ArianeGroup. As part of the Ariane rocket family, it is operate ...

, 12 launches of

New Glenn New Glenn is a heavy-lift launch vehicle developed and operated by the American company Blue Origin. The rocket is designed to have a Reusable launch vehicle, partially reusable, two-stage design with a diameter of . The first stage is powered ...

(with options for 15 additional flights), and 38 launches on the Vulcan launch vehicle from United Launch Alliance. Amazon previously announced that it had purchased the final nine

rocket launches from ULA before its retirement. In August 2023, a lawsuit was filed by an Amazon

shareholder A shareholder (in the United States often referred to as stockholder) of corporate stock refers to an individual or legal entity (such as another corporation, a body politic, a trust or partnership) that is registered by the corporation as the ...

, Cleveland Bakers and Teamsters Pension Fund, against the company claiming the Amazon board of directors acted in

bad faith Bad faith (Latin: ''mala fides'') is a sustained form of deception which consists of entertaining or pretending to entertain one set of feelings while acting as if influenced by another."of two hearts ... a sustained form of deception which c ...

when procuring the approximately $10 billion in launch contracts for the constellation, which amounted to Amazon's second-largest capital expenditure to date. Contracts to Blue Origin, owned by Bezos, amounted to 45% of the total expenditure. The suit suggests that animosity between Bezos and SpaceX founder Elon Musk may have precluded Amazon from contracting SpaceX's

Falcon 9 Falcon 9 is a Reusable launch system#Partial reusable launch systems, partially reusable, two-stage-to-orbit, medium-lift launch vehicle designed and manufactured in the United States by SpaceX. The first Falcon 9 launch was on June 4, 2010, an ...

vehicle, which is flight proven and potentially more cost-effective. Two initial prototype satellites, “KuiperSat-1” and “KuiperSat-2” launched on October 6, 2023 on an

rocket operated by United Launch Alliance from

. The mission was deemed a success and both satellites were deorbited.

Post prototype launch

In December 2023, it was announced that Amazon had secured three Kuiper launches aboard

. The Vulcan Centaur rocket launched for the first time on January 8, 2024, clearing the way for the future ordered launches of Kuiper Systems satellites. Vulcan will launch 38 times for Kuiper.

made its maiden flight on 9 July 2024. Ariane 6 is responsible for 18 Kuiper launches. The first 27 production satellites were launched on April 28, 2025 aboard an Atlas V rocket. The company said that it had successfully established communications with all of the satellites.

Technology

Satellite constellation

Kuiper has launched two prototype satellites and 27 production satellites to date as of April 2025. Project Kuiper System is planned to consist of 3,236 satellites operating in 98 orbital planes in three orbital shells, one each at , , and

orbital altitude A geocentric orbit, Earth-centered orbit, or Earth orbit involves any object orbiting Earth, such as the Moon or artificial satellites. In 1997, NASA estimated there were approximately 2,465 artificial satellite payloads orbiting Earth and 6,21 ...

. The satellites are equipped with

Hall-effect thruster In spacecraft propulsion, a Hall-effect thruster (HET) is a type of ion thruster in which the propellant is accelerated by an electric field. Hall-effect thrusters (based on the discovery by Edwin Hall) are sometimes referred to as Hall thruste ...

technology. Phase 1 of deployment will be 578 satellites at 630 km altitude and an orbital inclination of 51.9 degrees. A total of five phases of constellation development are planned. Kuiper is planned to work in concert with Amazon's previously announced large network of 12 satellite ground station facilities (the "AWS Ground Station unit") announced in November 2018. In addition to connecting to ground stations to connect to the ground-based internet, satellites will interconnect via optical infrared laser connections. Amazon refers to this technology as OISL (optical inter-satellite link). These lasers are capable of maintaining 100 Gbps over distances up to 2,600 km among two satellites moving at 25,000 km/h. Current in-space tests have demonstrated this speed up to a distance of 1,000km.

User terminals

Multiple customer terminal designs are planned for different market needs. Project Kuiper’s standard customer terminal is expected to measure less than 11 inches square and 1 inch thick, and weigh less than five pounds without its mounting bracket. The device is planned to deliver speeds up to 400 megabits per second (Mbps). Amazon expects to produce these terminals for less than $400 each. An ultra-compact design 7-inch square customer terminal weighing one pound will offer speeds up to 100 Mbps. This design will connect residential customers for lower-costs, as well as government and enterprise customers pursuing applications like ground mobility and

internet of things Internet of things (IoT) describes devices with sensors, processing ability, software and other technologies that connect and exchange data with other devices and systems over the Internet or other communication networks. The IoT encompasse ...

. A high-bandwidth design 19 inches by 30 inches terminal will deliver speeds up to 1 gigabit per second.

Facilities

Organizational headquarters for Kuiper Systems are located at an Amazon R&D facility in

Redmond, Washington Redmond is a city in King County, Washington, United States, located east of Seattle. The population was 73,256 at the 2020 United States census, 2020 census. Redmond is best known as the home of Microsoft and Nintendo of America. The city h ...

since 2020. Development of satellite prototypes and production methods were initially performed at the Redmond site. Manufacturing and satellite production is located at 172,000-square-foot facility in nearby

Kirkland, Washington Kirkland is a city in King County, Washington, United States. A suburb east of Seattle, its population was 92,175 in the 2020 U.S. census which made it the sixth largest city in King County and the twelfth largest city in the state of Washington. ...

. The factory in Kirkland opened in April 2024 and is planned to manufacture five satellites per day at peak capacity. A logistics center in

Everett, Washington Everett (; ) is the county seat and most populous city of Snohomish County, Washington, United States. It is north of Seattle and is one of the main cities in the Seattle metropolitan area, metropolitan area and the Puget Sound region. Everett ...

, is expected to open in June 2024 to supply the Kirkland factory with kits assembled from raw materials. A satellite processing and integration facility is planned in Florida at NASA's

Kennedy Space Center The John F. Kennedy Space Center (KSC, originally known as the NASA Launch Operations Center), located on Merritt Island, Florida, is one of the NASA, National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) ten NASA facilities#List of field c ...

to integrate spacecraft for launch aboard Blue Origin and United Launch Alliance rockets from the spaceport. The 31,000-square-meter facility is not expected to be operational before early 2025, and Amazon will use a third-party payload processing facility until its own is fully commissioned.

Launches

References

External links

* {{Satellite constellations Aerospace companies of the United States Amazon (company) Private spaceflight companies Communications satellite constellations Communications satellites in low Earth orbit Satellite Internet access