A bunch of offshore thunderstorms has forced United Launch Alliance to clean an attempt to launch the first of the dozens of missions on behalf of its greatest commercial customer, Amazon. Its Atlas 5 551 Rocket will wear 27 Kuiper Project satellites on board.
The mission, called Kuiper 1 by Ula and Kuiper Atlas 1 (Ka-01) by Amazon, will send the first batch of its complete production satellites in low land orbit. The Amazon Internet satellite constellation, called Project Kuiper, is designed to compete with others, like Starlink by Spacex and Oneweb from Eutelsat.
A new launch date is determined by the ULA and the eastern range.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCD27_0T8BQ
Tuesday, the 45th meteorological squadron, based in Patrick Space Force Base, has planned 55% of favorable time, with concerns linked to the clouds of cumulus, strong winds of takeoff and the potential impact of isolated showers. This perspective is slightly worse than what was scheduled for Monday.
“The cold front, which brought dispersed showers and isolated thunderstorms in the center of Florida this morning, should be east of the Bahamas on Wednesday evening,” wrote meteorologists. “A low developing along this border, associated with the decline behind the front should bring a windy onshore flows and isolated and fast moving showers for the launch window.”
The launching weather agents, however, throughout the launch window, time has remained with an 80% probability of raping weather conditions with a combination of strong winds and the proximity of offshore storms.
Once it is withdrawn from the cushion, the ULA Atlas 5 rocket will fly in a northeast trajectory.
The ULA uses its most powerful Atlas 5 configuration, 551, which includes five solid rocket boosters from Northrop Grumman.
Understanding this mission, Amazon has eight Atlas 5 rockets that he bought to launch his Kuiper satellites. In a round table in the media on Monday, the president and chief executive officer of the ULA, Tory Bruno, said that the company could launch another mission Kuiper Atlas at the end of spring or at the beginning of the summer before moving on to their first national security mission on a Vulcan rocket.
When asked if Ula expected to go through the eight Amazon Atlas rocket missions this year, Bruno said: “Perhaps, not necessarily. I don’t think I’m taking all the atlases for them this year. I think it will be 26 before doing them, “he said.
Bruno said they were considering the end of the summer for the first launch of Kuiper satellites on a Vulcan rocket, which would carry 45 Kuiper satellites on board. The following two launches of Vulcan are provided for the missions of its phase 2 contract launching the national security space (NSSL). The USSF-106 will be launched first, followed by the USSF-87.
“There will be many of everyone (Vulcan and Atlas) and this should take Amazon well on the way where they have enough spaceship for the revenue generation, which really means the initial services offered, which is quite exciting,” said Bruno.
Bruno expects Ula will launch somewhere in the 11-13 missions area before the end of the year, there was roughly an equal split between Atlas and Vulcan. It will be a mixture of launches for the American government and Amazon.
Project Kuiper emerges
The Kuiper project constellation will ultimately be made up of more than 3,200 satellites in low terrestrial orbit. Like Starlink de SpaceX, Amazon wants to have a large constellation to provide low latency internet to commercial, civilian and government customers.
“We have undertaken to design the most advanced satellite network ever built and we created everything internally on Amazon,” said Rajeev Baaly, vice-president of Kuiper Satellite Network technology in a video produced by Amazon. “You need almost all technological fields to help build the satellite, the propulsion system, solar tables, silicon, phase network antennas, inter-satellite optical links.”
The Kuiper 1 mission will carry the first complete production satellites for the Kuiper project. Amazon launched two prototypes of satellites on another Atlas 5 rocket in October 2023 to test the capacities and give Project Kuiper a better overview of certain changes necessary for the final version.
According to the stipulations of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Amazon said that it would start customer service once the 578 satellites the first launched and operational.
The 3,236 satellites will be spread over 98 orbital plans at 590 km, 610 km and 630 km above sea level. For comparison, the International Space Station Orbe between 370 and 460 km at altitude.
“All this might not go perfectly, but we have an incredible commitment to this project and an incredible team engaged in this mission,” said Baaly.
Beyond the Atlas 5 Rockets that he bought, Amazon also bought 38 launches on Ula Vulcan Rocket as well as a combined launch of 33 launches on Arianespace from Ariane 6, the new Glenn and SpaceX rockets of SpaceX.
Offering service to ordinary people and businesses is not the only objective of Amazon. The company has also created Kuiper Government Solutions (KGS) LLC as a legally distinct entity of the Kuiper project.
Amazon said KGS is designed “to support specialized governmental capabilities, from secure land -in -law to space networking solutions using the Kuiper sales network”.
KGS and L3harris technologies announced a partnership on Monday to provide a service combined with government needs. By launching this to potential government customers, L3harris said that he brought “proven and resilient open systems, from SATCOM terminals to robust tactical radios (to) ensure transparent integration in your existing operations”.
“The synergies of our new partnership will offer interoperability to employment and specialized systems for military, public and commercial security applications, offering customers more flexibility in their communication networks than ever before,” said Sam Mehta, president of communication systems for L3harris, in a press release. “This partnership is crucial to provide extensive and improved capacities not available today and strengthens our mutual commitment to provide resilient, secure and reliable solutions to our customers.”
