Amazon’s Project Kuiper is more than the company’s response to SpaceX(spectrum.ieee.org) |
Amazon’s Project Kuiper is more than the company’s response to SpaceX(spectrum.ieee.org) |
That's the biggest if clause you will ever see about this because in order for it to succeed at all BO needs to actually launch something to orbit at least once before we talk about success of a commercial product on top of their rockets.
I follow up SpaceX quite closely, I admit, but any news about products that absolutely depend on the launch capability of BO is vaporware at most and most probably a PR stunt so they look relevant. They need to deliver something, anything, it's that simple.
And they need start launching soon. FCC rules give Amazon until 2026 to launch and start operating at least 50% of the licensed number of satellites - 1618 satellites - or risk their satellite constellation license annulled.
To put this timeframe in context, Blue Origin was founded in 2000 and has yet to achieve a single orbital flight.
* BO rocket 2x the cargo size * Satellites same size/weight as starlink
120 sats per launch(vs F9's 60). If they have to launch 1618 by 2026, that means they need 14 launches in 6 years.
If they only need 1/2 the 1618, they need 7 launches in 6 years.
So I think 7 launches(840 sats) it's still in the realm of possibility, but they have to execute everything pretty much flawlessly to make it happen. They can't afford to have many things go wrong.
Getting 14 launches done in 6 years would be very ambitious. Unless they are way way further along than they have told the public, this is probably just wishful thinking.
I am curious what would happen here. Lets say they get 45% of their satellites up and miss the mark.
Do we just end up with a hundres of useless satellites drifting in space doing nothing or are they forced to sell (Who would buy) or?
This seems like onf of those PR disasters in the making for the FCC in terms of space pollution with no benefit.
We first achieved orbital flight over 50 years ago, and many different groups have achieved the same since then. Given Bezos' deep pockets, why would BO fail where so many other have succeeded in launching payloads to orbit?
They appear to be making steady progress, both on reusability and on their BE-4 engine. There doesn't appear to be any real insurmountable obstacles between where they are today and orbital flight.
I'm not saying they will absolutely succeed, but their success feels more like a when than an if unless Bezos decides to pull the plug for some reason. Whether they can do this by 2026 is of course a different matter.
Regardless of how rich Bezos is, can he bring the right type of talent together and get that talent to make no errors? How many hundreds of millions to billions of dollars is he willing to throw away with nothing to show for it? It's not just can it be done, it's can it be done in this competitive environment before SpaceX pulls so far ahead that there isn't any reason to compete? Add onto it that most of the top talent wants to be, and is, at SpaceX.
There are have only been maybe a dozen LEO+ launch families developed ever, and less than a handful by private companies. There exist only 3 active systems in the same category as New Glenn (Long March 5, Delta IV, Falcon Heavy).
Getting anything more than a toy to orbit is _extremely_ difficult, and many have lost untold millions trying to get just a toy to orbit. It is a _really big deal_.
Guess: Blue Origin employees don’t get equity.
Obviously more motivates an aerospace engineer than cashing out. But my understanding is Bezos owns 100% of Blue Origin. It’s solely his project. That probably changes the type of person they attract and their personal dedication to the effort.
Also, “so many others” haven’t succeeded on orbital insertion. Most efforts (start counting at successful motor test) failed.
Arguably true, but to the extent that is is true, it makes BOs failures to do so given how much time and money has been spent on it rather inexplicable, no?
Either they're doing something hard (and might fail), or they're doing something easy so why haven't they succeeded? Either way you cut it, it's a bad look.
> They appear to be making steady progress
It's certainly slow. Whether it's steady or indeed, progress, remains to be seen.
> I'm not saying they will absolutely succeed, but their success feels more like a when than an if unless Bezos decides to pull the plug for some reason.
Let's hope.
The Falcon 9, started design in 2005, first launched in 2010 and rapidly improved to the state we have now.
Meanwhile, the New Glenn started in 2012 and has yet to produce anything but engine tests videos, which are cool, but its not a vehicle.
So why the positivity? Because they made videos and a giant plastic lander mockup?
Why the negativity? They tried to patent landing rockets on a ship ten years ago, and still have never done it.
Sure, you just have to run fast enough. If you meant that from a PR perspective, I agree. Sad, but true.
It’s the script some people are reading aloud, “I don’t understand why there is negativity...” like GPT-3 made out of human flesh.
The big thing that keeps coming up around Blue Origin is that still to date they're entirely unproven for any real flights. They're older than SpaceX and most of their lives have been exclusively focused on sub-orbital flights, and most of that was centered around the "space tourism" business.
They switched in 2014 to targeting orbital missions and from the outside it looks like that was only done for a contract with ULA (specifically this is the creation of the BE-4 engine). After that they started taking orbital options seriously, proposing the New Glenn as its own orbital launch vehicle the following year.
It may also now be worth pointing out that the BE-4 wasn't independently designed to work with the New Glenn or for any specific mission characteristics that Blue Origin had planned. It is supposed to be a drop in replacement for the RD-180 engines we were purchasing from Russia for the Atlas V which is a major design constraint.
You're also right that they haven't been performing as much PR as SpaceX but I don't think that's by choice. Every time they've had a success or an attempt at success they've done very large PR campaigns and even taunt Elon publicly but those are few and far between.
They have absolutely had successes but they've also missed all of their target deadlines they've announced publicly and with their contracts. They have yet to have a successful payload to orbit and now they're talking about using a non-existent platform to launch 1,618 satellites to orbit by 2026. If they get the same density of satellites as Starlink (56/mission I believe, didn't look this up) that is about 27 launches.
I hate to toot SpaceX's horn, but they're currently the gold standard on rapid development of rocketry so it's worth comparing their time line to this one proposed by Blue Origin. As a starting point Blue Origin has not launched their BE-4 rocket into orbit yet much less with a payload so they haven't reached the beginning of it yet:
* September 2008: SpaceX successfully gets their rocket into orbit
* July 2009: SpaceX successfully gets first commercial payload into orbit
* June 2010: The Falcon 9 v1.0 platform has its first launch
* 2010-2013: SpaceX launches 7 missions
* 2014: SpaceX launches 6 missions
* 2015: SpaceX launches 7 missions
* July 2016: SpaceX launches its 27th mission
* January 2017: SpaceX launches its 27th successful mission
So at least in my opinion Blue Origin may not entirely be vaporware, but their time line seems unreasonable. To be successful in this endeavour using exclusively Blue Origin rockets, while taking on no additional launches, they would have to be more than twice as fast at development as SpaceX while using hardware that was designed for another purpose, in an market segment that they didn't start in.
And it's obviously not his wealth that he's envious of. I believe it's the adoration, the faith in his abilities, and excitement of a cult following. All he wants is for people to do for him what you are doing for Musk.
Does that quote sound fishy or what?
Seems like SpaceX matching AWS would take much less effort than the reverse.
All of which is to say: current technology, and physics, probably won't ever allow this to be baked into a Kindle.
In real life, lets be realistic Starlink is something will solve suburb access, also gives them an ability to exercise before Mars/Moon/something_else deployment. The impact on DC will be tiny.
> “If Kuiper succeeds, Amazon can not only offer global satellite broadband access—it can include that access as part of its Amazon Web Services (AWS), which already offers resources for cloud computing, machine learning, data analytics, and more”
It’s a distribution advantage.
To sign up a new customer, Starlink has to...sign up a new customer. Contracts, configuration, payment details, integration. Kuiper, on the other hand, has to get them to click a button on a dashboard.
I think Starlink can figure out their onboarding customer experience faster than that happens..
No they can’t. A handful of Kuiper subscribers in Los Angeles can saturate all of available bandwidth in LA. These satellite constellations are only going to be useful for subscribers in relatively remote and less dense areas.
Is there any indication of how many customers they have or how much revenue they get from it?
Starlink is ready to go now and already is in Beta. They have more customers signing up for the beta than they can handle and they can charge practically any price they want for this service since nothing else like it exists.
If a simpleton like me is capable of taking a Yagi into my backyard and talking on AMSAT birds with a 5 watt handheld radio, it’s not entirely unreasonable to believe that someone well funded would be capable of tracking and destroying a cubesat in orbit.
I confess I didn't research it before asking but how does it withstand the attenuation due to bad weather, rain and storms. OK, at worst it should penetrate about 10 km of clouds and rains and an antenna on the ground could be farther away than that, but the source of the signal is at least 10 times more distant (100 times weaker for the same power?)
Damn SpaceX and their mediocre ambitions like colonising Mars (◔_◔)
SpaceX is going to have to create ground stations all over the world at sites with good view of the sky, get redundant backbone connections to them, and continuously pay for those sites. Good views of the sky rule out downtown locations in major cities due to skyscrapers. Outskirts of cities will likely not have the infrastructure for those redundant connections and will have to be permitted, and installed.
The Amazon data centers are usually already at ideal locations, and are effectively self-sustaining financially already instead of being an additional cost.
I don't think any of Amazon's existing products can provide them an edge, and Starlink has quite the head start in orbit, but Amazon does have a huge head start on the ground.
https://mobile.twitter.com/harlandduman/status/1277800518010...
There are some niches, for example oil/gas extraction like the article mentioned, but nothing huge. Maybe Amazon plans on making a play for in-car services providing both the internet connection, and back-end in AWS. But car internet connections have been shifting towards bluetooth as everyone already has phones and service, and it is wasteful to have another service for the car.
Wait, Kuiper is doing lasers?
They're also piling up immense amounts of cash, with not much to do with it other than begin kicking it back to shareholders (the same 'problem' Google, Microsoft, Apple and Facebook have had). Needless to say, Amazon clearly isn't eager to return it to shareholders via a dividend or buying back its stock. Five years from now? They'll be drowning in probably $40+ billion per year in operating profit. They can trivially afford whatever it costs to do the launches with someone other than BO, even if it's very expensive. It doesn't have to make financial sense today.
For an individual, probably. For an enterprise, skipping new vendor procurement is a material advantage. I don't think it's a decisive one. But it's an advantage nonetheless.
I still think that Bezos can do it if he wants to. If SpaceX were for sale, Bezos could buy them 5 times over (as of their valuation based on their February funding). I have to believe that level of capital could build a company with similar capabilities.
SpaceX has done, and continues to do, incredible work, but their success isn't magical, and it should be repeatable for another company.
Not 100% true, SpaceX went against a market that was not only disposable but also extremely inefficiently built. Today's market is significantly more competitive both from SpaceX's side but the other launchers have also decreased prices and are in the process of building cheaper rockets as well.
These professors usually consult with a lot of government organizations and older companies. If you can make these professors your corporate shill, I guess it’s good marketing.
> Failure to meet the milestone requirements of 47 CFR § 25.164(b) may result in Kuiper’s authorization being reduced to the number of satellites in use on the milestone date
[1] FCC authorization: https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-authorizes-kuiper-satellite...
[2] FCC "Milestones" regulation for satellite communications: https://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/text-idx?SID=2b427aaecc8c5bcb88...
Blue Origin is disliked for being an extremely well-funded project that appears to make almost no progress after 20 years, yet causes SpaceX grief by being a patenting the landing rockets on ocean platforms idea just as they were about to achieve it (and the "join the club" tweet).
The hate may or may not be petty, but it's wrong to say it's not there.
Slow compared to what? Compared to SpaceX they're slow, but compared to everybody else?
NASA/Boeing's SLS program started in 2005 as Constellation. It's still over a year away from it's first test launch and several years away from fully operational status.
China's Long March 5 started in 2007 and it can be argued that it wasn't fully operational until this year.
ULA's Vulcan, started in 2014 is at least a year out. And it reuses the same Centaur upper stage as Atlas.
Slow compared to Orbital Sciences, who took 8 years in the 1980s.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20110723113333/http://www.rocket...
Worked for Tesla as well as SpaceX. Same goal for Boring / Hyperloop.
Seems like ubiquitous satellite internet would also be a good thing, and SpaceX would make money on the launch to fund Starship. Win-win? Silly logic from an armchair quarterback, but I don;'t think it's as weird as you think.
They appear to have the requisite resources & staff, so predicting that they will never do "the hard thing" seems a bit like spiking the football after the first quarter.
What makes you think that?
According to LinkedIn, they currently have ~2,800 full time employees. Their executive team comes from leadership roles at various aerospace agencies (both private and public).
They also appear to have no issues winning government space contracts: https://spaceflightnow.com/2020/04/30/blue-origin-wins-lions...
That they have the resources is just about the least controversial claim. Whether they can actually execute on it is another question entirely. Despite the uncertainty, no credible person can claim with certainty that they will fail.
You assume that Amazon has to use a US launch provider which isn’t the case.
So far there are at least five "maybes" in the equation:
1. amazon launching from Russia in large numbers 2. Khrunichev lowering the price of a single Angara significantly 3. Khrunichev being able to produce enough rockets in the first place 4. amazon being able to stack their satellites into the Angara 5. amazon being able to produce enough working satellites in the remaining time frame.
For me that still counts as vaporware.
If Starlink can't beat Kupier they're dead anyway those satellites will go up eventually.
That's not really the point though. Amazon is a fierce (and many times dirty) competitor to be up against.
If you're competing directly with AWS then you need to take every advantage you can get. If you're trying to build a global satellite network to provide internet access and not having launch capabilities will delay AWS long enough to get a foothold in the market then you take it.
If Amazon has shown at least some launches done in good faith, expect the FCC to be VERY lenient if Amazon don't meet their goal of launching 1618 out of 3236 satellites.
Though if in the year 2026 Amazon has missed their target by a significant amount, expect SpaceX to sue to try to get the spectrum partially re-allocated so they can leverage it for their (likely already fully operational) Starlink service.
But if they are way off, if they only launch 120 sats, instead of the 1,618 they need to launch, I expect even the FCC would rake them over the coals some. If SpaceX is the only provider that met their timeline with the FCC(which seems more and more likely as time goes by that they will be the only one), they will still probably be lenient, but I imagine they will get a stern talking to, about hurrying up!
That...depends. The FCC has been rather politicized recently, and shifts approximately with US Presidential Administrations; if when the time came the Administration was as anti-Bezos as the current one, I wouldn't be surprised to see it hold Amazon to the letter of the terms whether or not the intent of the rules was different and usual practice involved fairly easy modification as long as good-faith effort was shown.
Since reliability is going to fundamentally change by that much in order to have massive passenger rockets replacing jet travel, Blue Origin has nothing to worry about. There is a magic invention that is going to completely change the game, and it won't be patented since those aren't worth doing according to Musk.
Musk also said a robo taxi network is coming online this year. He said it will need a bit of winter training but would have that integrated by the end of the year as well. Full level 5, all conditions and scenarios a human can drive in[2]. Steering wheel can be taken off afterwards. Recent news says it is going to be several weeks before they have any sort of object permanence implemented/temporal picture of the scene, but apparently that is all part of the plan.
Unless Tesla and SpaceX have completely alien tech, I'm confident Bezos could do the 6 launches by 6 years.
[1] https://www.vox.com/2018/4/11/17227036/flight-spacex-gwynne-...
What has BO done other than land a suborbital rocket that doesn’t achieve more than tiny fraction of orbital velocity? They haven’t even had a person ride it yet, let alone a paying customer on board.
I suppose {sat -> orbital DC -> sat} (latency) or {sat -> orbital DC processing -> ground} (transmission bandwidth) are the primary use cases? Maybe security?
So yes, its reasonable BO will be launching payloads within the same time frame, 10-20 years.