“[Amazon] are a long way behind SpaceX,” says Tim Farrar, founder of Silicon Valley consultancy TMF Associates. “It is going to take quite a few years to get this constellation up and running.”
Bezos, 60, has long been a space fanatic and is known for his love of the science fiction series Star Trek. He founded his own rocket company, Blue Origin, in 2000, which has the vision of “millions of people living and working in space for the benefit of Earth”. Yet Amazon only began work on Kuiper in 2018, almost two decades later.
A rivalry with SpaceX quickly followed. In 2018, Musk sacked seven senior leaders at the company in a row over his typically ambitious deadlines. Several decamped to Amazon.
Musk himself has repeatedly goaded Bezos personally, posting a “silver medal” emoji in 2021 when he overtook the billionaire as the world’s richest man and calling him a “copycat” after news emerged that Amazon was working on a Starlink rival.
Meanwhile, lobbyists for both companies have routinely attacked the other over their developments. Bezos’s Blue Origin sued Nasa in 2021 over its multibillion-dollar deal with SpaceX to take humans back to the Moon, alleging that the $3bn lunar lander contract had been awarded through an unfair process. Blue Origin ultimately lost the lawsuit.
More recently, Amazon has protested to US regulators about Starlink’s plans to expand its network with thousands more satellites. In response to one recent complaint, one of Musk’s lawyers wrote that Amazon has “filed hundreds of pages against SpaceX, concocting elaborate methods to hamstring SpaceX’s ability to connect Americans”.
Despite its standing start, some industry watchers believe Amazon has the opportunity to challenge Starlink – and certain advantages over Musk’s rival system.
Unlike SpaceX, Amazon also has a cash hoard expected to swell to $100bn this year that it can use to fund its venture. Musk, by contrast, has to keep raising capital or selling Tesla stock. The billionaire also, ultimately, wants to make a large profit from Starlink’s operations. “Starlink only makes sense for SpaceX if it generates cash,” says Chris Quilty, founder of research firm Quilty Space. He is hoping it will help fund his future gambits in space exploration.
For Amazon, however, a fat profit is less of a concern. There are big potential upsides of owning a global broadband network. It could connect hundreds of millions of people to reliable internet connections for the first time, bringing in subscription revenues and, ultimately, coax them into signing up to Amazon Prime.
“They can justify Kuiper based on its ability to sign up more Prime customers,” Quilty says. “There are a lot of ways Amazon can win.”
Amazon also has a substantial consumer hardware business and supply chain, which has produced tens of millions of Echo smart speakers and other gadgets. These need internet connectivity and expanding its reach could help Amazon sell more devices.
When Amazon began developing Kuiper, named for an asteroid belt surrounding Neptune, industry insiders say the company focused heavily on making its consumer terminal – the dishes used to connect its satellites to home broadband – as cheap as possible.