3 comments

• mkent

  June 23, 2025 at 3:07 pm

  ”This was the second set of Kuiper satellites launched for Amazon. It now has 54 satellites in orbit…”

  With this launch Kuiper passes Galileo (27 satellites), O3b (28 sats), GPS (32 active sats), Orbcomm (36 sats), Eutelsat (37 sats), Guowang (37 operational sats), Intelsat (45 sats), SES (49 sats), and Compass (52 sats) to become the 8th largest satellite constellation in the world behind Starlink (7000+ sats), OneWeb (654 sats), SuperDove (230+ sats), Starshield (185 sats), Lemur (110 sats), Thousand Sails (90 sats), and Iridium (82 sats).

  Kuiper will almost certainly be third or fourth in the world by the end of the year depending on how fast the Chinese launch their Thousand Sails constellation. If I remember right Kuiper can start service with 650 satellites, so that will probably happen sometime next year unless they botch the ground station rollout like OneWeb did. Because of their ground station issues, OneWeb won’t really be able to rollout service until the end of next year. Kuiper has a good chance to pass them right by.
• Dick Eagleson

  June 24, 2025 at 3:15 pm

  mkent,

  Good analysis.

  I would note that ground station infrastructure is far less important to Starlink and Kuiper than to OneWeb because the long-haul routing by the former two is all done on-orbit. OneWeb’s birds, lacking on-orbit cross-links, rely far more on ground stations and cannot serve over-ocean aviation or blue water maritime markets at all.

  How fast Kuiper can actually achieve “minimum viable product” status, per your definition, depends upon both launch availability and production cadence for its sats. Neither looks exactly rosy. Owing to a long-delayed USSF Vulcan launch now scheduled for July, ULA won’t be able to do even a third Atlas V mission for Kuiper before August. An initial launch of Kuipersats on Vulcan probably can’t happen before Sept. Ariane 6 and New Glenn inaugural Kuipersat launches are even further out than that. So the next Kuipersat launch mission – of an as-yet-unkown number of sats and on a date yet to be firmly specified – will all but certainly be on an F9.

  Kuiper had 27 launchable sats in late April and another 27 in not-quite-as-late June. That implies a production rate that may be as low as 14 – 15 sats/month. That, in turn, would imply that it would take 40 or more additional months to build and launch 600 more sats, assuming no improvement in production cadence. One hopes Kuiper can step production up to far beyond that level, but there is no obvious sign of such a step-up and at least one sign otherwise.

  That would be the delay in launch dates for all three of the F9 launches Kuiper bought from SpaceX in response to a shareholder lawsuit. All three were shown as scheduled for launch in June on nextspaceflight.com’s upcoming missions roster as of early this month. Then, two of them fell off of the June list and recently the third has followed suit. As there is manifestly no shortage of F9 launch opportunities, the only plausible reason for such slippages is lack of sats in sufficient quantities to fill an F9 fairing – or three.

  One variable for which we don’t yet seem to have a definite value is how many Kuipersats an F9 can carry aloft in one load. Estimates range from 21 to 27. The launch date and manifest size of the first such F9 mission will provide an updated estimate of Kuipersat production cadence. An early July launch with 27 sats, for example, would imply a much healthier production cadence than would a launch in late July with only 21. An August initial F9 Kuipersat launch would imply no real change in production cadence during the entire year-to-date.

  So it would be nice to assume an initial operational capability for the Kuiper constellation of “sometime next year,” but neither demonstrated production cadence nor launch availability from current suppliers suggests such a schedule is makeable absent serious increases in both production and launch cadences. Launch cadence can be quickly boosted by buying more F9 missions from SpaceX. But there would be no point in doing so if Kuipersat production cadence makes feeding even the relatively infrequent launch opportunities afforded by Amazon’s other contractors the real roadblock on the critical path.
• Richard M

  June 24, 2025 at 5:19 pm

  Kuiper had 27 launchable sats in late April and another 27 in not-quite-as-late June. That implies a production rate that may be as low as 14 – 15 sats/month. That, in turn, would imply that it would take 40 or more additional months to build and launch 600 more sats, assuming no improvement in production cadence.

  To quote Mark Hanna, they gotta pump those numbers up. Those are rookie numbers in this racket.