Early Monday morning, a Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from its original launch site in Florida. Remarkably, it was SpaceX's 100th launch of the year.

Perhaps even more notable was the rocket's payload: two-dozen Project Kuiper satellites, which were dispensed into low-Earth orbit on target. This was SpaceX's second launch of satellites for Amazon, which is developing a constellation to deliver low-latency broadband Internet around the world. SpaceX, then, just launched a direct competitor to its Starlink network into orbit. And it was for the founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, who owns a rocket company of his own in Blue Origin.

So how did it come to this—Bezos and Elon Musk, competitors in so many ways, working together in space?

Read full article

Comments

© SpaceX

Amazon has successfully launched its first satellites for the company’s Project Kuiper internet-from-space service, which will take on SpaceX’s Starlink service. The satellites launched aboard a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket from  Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 7 p.m. ET on Monday. The KA-01 mission is deploying 27 satellites to […]

Amazon is champing at the bit to get its first Project Kuiper satellites into orbit so that it can start building a service that will one day rival SpaceX’s Starlink, which offers broadband connectivity to more than five million customers globally. The web giant is planning to launch 27 Project Kuiper internet satellites on a […]

Amazon’s Project Kuiper, the company’s initiative to launch a fleet of satellites into low-Earth orbit and beam internet connection to users, is struggling to ramp up production, Bloomberg reported on Wednesday. The competitor to Elon Musk’s Starlink has completed only a few dozen satellites, according to the report. The venture reportedly needs to quadruple its […]