NRO: It looks like your “workhorse” through another shoe—I mean nozzle.

Bot: “Yes, and?”

My latest refresh of nextspaceflight.com reveals that only one of the three F9 Kuipersat launches is still scheduled for June – and still without a specific date. The other two have now slipped to non-specific dates in 3Q 2025. That suggests that production cadence really is the pacing problem with Kuiper deployment. I quite agree with you that that is going to make it materially harder to wangle an indulgence from even Trump’s FCC. I’ll invoke an Elon-ism here – “excitement guaranteed.”

I guess the thing about Badyal that makes me wonder is why the man still has a job. He is where he is entirely because Bezos put him there when he was still running Amazon. As with the former head schlepper at Blue Origin – and perhaps even its current one – Bezos seems to have a much higher tolerance for non-performance by senior managers than most CEOs. I don’t find that to be a good thing.

Its their model now. Gather investors and government cash and write it off when the launches do not happen. Keep the difference.

how long will the internal revenue service and the government allow this to happen?

Then there is the separate matter of satellite production cadence. The only reason the first launch of operational Kuipersats didn’t occur until April was that it took Amazon until then to produce the first 27 units – ULA’s Atlas Vs were not the roadblock on the critical path.

*This* is the real issue that Amazon has to solve.

I think that the FCC will cut them a lot of slack on an extension if the problem is just lack of launch capability. But if they can’t get the satellites manufactured and ready in the first place, it calls the whole program into question in a more fundamental way.

Elon Musk fired Rajeev Badyal from his gig as head of Starlink precisely because manufacturing was going so slowly, Now Rajeev runs Kuiper. It does make one wonder.

Then there is the separate matter of satellite production cadence. The only reason the first launch of operational Kuipersats didn’t occur until April was that it took Amazon until then to produce the first 27 units – ULA’s Atlas Vs were not the roadblock on the critical path.

Amazon has cranked out at least an additional 27 units since April, but it’s going to need a lot more than that to fill not only this latest Atlas V but also the three Falcon 9s currently shown as scheduled for June launches but without any assigned launch dates as yet. This lack of specificity can have nothing to do with Falcon 9 availability so I take it to be an indication that the uncertainty is all on the Kuipersat production side of things. That being so, I will hardly be surprised if one of more of the three prospective F9 Kuipersat missions is delayed into July or even beyond.

27 sats produced over two months is about one sat every two days. Amazon is going to have to quickly ramp that production cadence up by about a full order of magnitude if it is to have any chance of deploying 1,600 sats in barely over a year. And if the launch cadences of Vulcan, New Glenn and Ariane 6 don’t all also take sharp ticks upward, that would put launch capacity back as the critical path roadblock. The only potential escape from a launch availability dearth on the currently designated vehicles would be to make a sizable deal with SpaceX – which would be, without question, delighted to book the business.

But production cadence is key. If that falls short, not even SpaceX will be able to pull Amazon’s chestnuts out of the fire.