Amazon is enlisting the help of one of its biggest rivals to launch its Project Kuiper internet satellite into space. Amazon announced on Friday that it will use SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket for three launches starting in 2025.
Project Kuiper is Amazon's low-Earth orbit satellite program that will eventually provide users around the world with internet connectivity anywhere. Amazon launched the first two "Project Kuiper" test satellites into space in October this year and successfully connected to the Internet and made two-way video calls. However, Amazon still needs to work hard to catch up with SpaceX's Starlink, which has deployed about 5,000 satellites.
Despite the competition between the two companies, it's not surprising that Amazon has chosen SpaceX as its future launch provider. As an earlier report in the Wall Street Journal pointed out, satellite companies and government agencies have increasingly relied on SpaceX's reusable rockets to obtain stable and cheap launch services. In the first six months of 2023 alone, the Elon Musk-owned company has provided services for 88% of launch plans.
However, most of Amazon's satellites will still be launched by Arianespace, Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin and United Launch Alliance (ULA). Amazon worked with the three companies on as many as 83 launches last year, which Amazon said "provides sufficient capacity to launch the majority of its planned 3,236-satellite constellation." Amazon will deploy additional Project Kuiper satellites in the first half of 2024 and begin testing by the end of next year.