Blue Origin’s proposed TeraWave constellation: Is it really competition with SpaceX?
Blue Origin announced yesterday that it going to build a major satellite constellation — dubbed TeraWave and comprising more than 5,000 satellites — to provide internet service to the globe while also providing data center capability for those companies that wish to establish space-based cloud computing facilities.
It plans to begin launching satellites in 2027.
As I noted in today’s quick links below, such a story would normally merit a full post, “but considering Blue Origin’s inability to get almost anything off the ground, this proposal doesn’t deserve that much coverage at this point.” I just can’t get excited about any Blue Origin proposal, until they actually start launching it. For almost a decade this company has been making these kind of grand announcements, and has only so far managed to achieve one, its New Glenn rocket. And that has come years late and at a pace that is glacial.
Not surprisingly, the mainstream propaganda press immediately went bonkers over this proposal, immediately declaring most absurdly that TeraWave is already a major challenger to SpaceX’s Starlink constellation. Here are just a few very typical examples:
- BBC: Bezos’ Blue Origin announces satellite rival to Musk’s Starlink
- CNBC: Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin launches satellite internet service to rival SpaceX, Amazon
- Business Insider: Jeff Bezos’s grand plan for a satellite constellation to rival SpaceX is coming together
- The Verge: Blue Origin’s Starlink rival TeraWave promises 6-terabit satellite internet
This adulation by the mainstream press of Bezos is far from unusual. For reasons that baffle me, the propaganda press has consistently considered any project proposal coming from a Jeff Bezos’ company to instantly be God’s gift to humanity. For more than a decade now it has been touting Blue Origin as the company that SpaceX needs to beat, flipping reality on its head. Now it ranks Blue Origin’s TeraWave constellation a major Starlink rival, when it is at least two years from even launching its first satellite.
There is one aspect of this story however that does deserve to be highlighted because it appears no one else is noticing it, which is why I after some thought I decided to write this full post. When Bezos controlled both Blue Origin and Amazon, the idea of having Amazon create the Leo constellation made sense. Bezos was doing what Musk was doing with SpaceX/Starlink, using his rocket to launch his constellation, with the revenue produced by Leo available to Bezos to fund Blue Origin space projects, as he wished.
Bezos however has stepped back from Amazon, so Blue Origin has lost that model. It can no longer profit significantly from the revenue Leo eventually produces for Amazon, as SpaceX is does with Starlink.
Artist rendering of Orbital Reef design, as of
April 2025. Click for original image.
Thus, Bezos is now creating a Blue Origin constellation for this purpose. When TeraWave launches and begins garnering customers, it will generate revenue to Blue Origin directly, which Blue Origin can then use to push Bezos’s own dreams in space.
And what are those dreams? Bezos has repeatedly said he wishes to move heavy industries into space, in order to protect the Earth from the pollution those industries produce. If he follows through with this concept, then in about a decade he will begin building such large facilities, either in orbit or on the Moon and elsewhere.
For example, Blue Origin’s proposed space station, Orbital Reef, has appeared completely dead for the past year-plus. The company has done practically no development. This could change however if TeraWave eventually pumps some cash into Blue Origin’s coffers.
But of course, such revenues are still at least a decade away, assuming Blue Origin moves fast. And that remains an decidedly uncertain possibility.
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Bezos gets his share of hate — for his billionaire status, for Amazon’s labor and business practices, for how he has been exercising his editorial control of the Washington Post, for his conspicuous consumption — but it’s still the case that he isn’t remotely as loathed as Elon Musk is. Elon Derangement Syndrome is a thing; Bezos Derangement Syndrome is not.
And I think that’s mainly what explains the positive slant on coverage of anything that promises competition with SpaceX: it’s loathing of Elon and his politics.
Richard M: This adulation of Bezos however goes back more than a decade, long before Musk earned the hate of the left for supporting Trump. I saw it in 2015, at the time both companies were doing the first vertical landings, and watched it continue for the next five-plus years. To the press, the companies were neck-and-neck, never once noticing that while SpaceX was setting amazing launch records, Blue Origin was doing nothing.
I suspect to most soace journalists, a rocket that makes it to space, and a rocket that achieves orbit are almost of not the same thing. So to them New Sheppard was the same as Falcon 9, and could stick the booster landing first, despite SpaceX trying to do it at sea.
Based on Berger’s article about this at Ars Technica, the plan does not seem to be to compete across the board with Starlink. TeraWave is intended for large-scale B2B connectivity. There will be some direct competition with Starlink at the high end of the broadband market, but not at the medium and small business or consumer levels. Such competition, to whatever extent it actually develops, would come from Amazon Leo – and I’m not planning to bet the rent on the success of that venture.
To the extent TeraWave provides in-space cloud services, it actually stands to compete more with Amazon Web Services than with Starlink – though a decade hence, who can say for sure what Starlink might transmogrify into? Much of the same basic hardware needed to provide AI data center capability atop Starlink would also allow cloud services to be offered.
And it also needs to be remembered that Blue has a fundamentally higher fixed and variable cost structure than does SpaceX. Blue’s rocket is still only partly reusable and is built using traditional, slow and expensive OldSpace fabrication technology. Achieving complete reusability for the New Glenn stack – if that is ever accomplished – will be neither easy nor quick as witness the apparently still moribund state of the Jarvis project.
Blue, in my view, will also need to significantly increase its launch infrastructure in order to support TeraWave deployment on any kind of reasonable schedule as well as do all of the other things it already wants to do. It has exactly one New Glenn pad. By the time TeraWave is supposed to start deployment in the late 2020s, SpaceX will have at least five Starship pads in service and perhaps as many as eight to ten. Blue needs to build at least one more pad and acquire at least one more booster recovery vessel – preferably more.
Where that notional second pad could go is far from obvious. Perhaps Blue can outbid SpaceX for SLC-41 once ULA expires, though I doubt that. The most likely pad site availability to materialize at Canaveral on the rough timeline needed is, in my view, the one now allocated for joint use by Phantom Space and Vaya Space. Or, perhaps Blue could do at the SLC-36 complex what SpaceX is already doing at Starbase and intends to do at SLC-37 and build a second pad near its first. We shall see.
Anent the mainstream press treatment of this announcement, it’s a combination of the ignorance and credulity of the legacy scribblers combined with their formidable politically-motivated distaste for Elon. Blue makes an announcement about a project years from initiation, and even more years from initial operation, and the legacy press treats it like a harbinger of imminent doom for Starlink. Utter bunk, of course. Even at its current customer growth rate, Starlink will have – by the time of the notional first TeraWave satellite launch – a worldwide customer base larger than the populations of all but the largest European countries.
It isn’t just Blue that gets this press treatment, by the way, so does the PRC. Every partially reusable rocket PowerPointed by some PRC “commercial” space company gets treated as the imminent bane of SpaceX’s Falcons.
So it goes.
Hello Bob,
“This adulation of Bezos however goes back more than a decade, long before Musk earned the hate of the left for supporting Trump.”
All I can think of is that Bezos tossed a lot of money at more progressive causes, and wasn’t shy about it. Perhaps that played a role.
The plan:
1.) Contribute to the DNC on the down low (while contributing to Romney types in the GOP).
2.) Tell Bloomy to shut up bashing space, or he will sue him too.
3.) If the DNC candidate gets, in—an investigation over Elon results in Starlink de-orbited.
4.) Take the next 20 years to launch something half as fast as Starlink—but folks will be starved for it, so…
Funny, Jeff, but not realistic. Unless the Democrats wanted to prove they were totalitarians who don’t pay even the slightest lip service to republicanism or our Constitution anymore, they can’t force SpaceX to deorbit Starlink.
Nate P: Sadly, based on the behavior of too many Democratic Party politicians and their supporters, it seems very clear to me that they are “totalitarians who don’t pay even the slightest lip service to republicanism or our Constitution anymore.”
Trump was legally elected, is president, and has the right to legally carry out his policies, as he so clearly outlined during the campaign. This seems unacceptable to the Democrats, and they are literally in revolt against the U.S. government in numerous Democratic Party strongholds.
This is who they are. If they win back power, they are going to move aggressively now to eliminate their opponents. And I doubt they will try to use the legal system, as they attempted against Trump from 2020 to 2024. They are quite open now about their willingness to use non-legal means.
Thus, this might be one time I actually agree with Jeff Wright, though I find his analysis to be simplistic and poorly thought out.
There are many, true-the Obama/Harris faction foremost among them. They have a lot of power at present, and a stranglehold on the minds of millions. But that’s against Musk, not SpaceX or Starlink. Totalitarians would rather have control than to eliminate such a useful tool, even if the rank and file would be dumb enough to call for it to be shut down. But if they press so hard the US gets to that point, they’ll convince half the country it has nothing to lose by defying them or even fighting them openly.
To Nate—Obama was far from the worst. Harris seems to like space. I like to listen to Red Eye Radio overnights. (I see poor Mr. Z is going by on Coast again…poor thing).
Gavin—the DNC Mitt Romney—destroyed dams…infrastructure mind you.
The Minnesotans are acting worse than Portlandians these days.
Any scenario that involves the Dems taking significant power in DC again has to be weighed against the Trump DOJ’s massive efforts to clean up voter rolls and eliminate a lot of the techniques Dems have used for decades to invent phony ballots when needful to win elections they would otherwise lose.
It also has to deal with the electoral fallout, nationwide, from the very recent discovery of the massive conspiracy – which includes most senior political figures in Minnesota – to attempt derailment of the Trump administration’s ICE efforts in Minneapolis and elsewhere to round up and deport illegals in addition to being neck-deep in all of the government program fraud, along with recent immigrants, about which we were already aware.
There is already ample basis for bringing RICO cases against the Democrat Party in several states and probably nationally as well.
“We’re all crooks! Vote for us!” doesn’t strike me as a battle cry likely to resonate with very much of the country.
this is why the “but Elon promised X and we only got Y” complaints are so ridiculous
everyone makes bold promises
delivering is harder