The American company Amazon of the wealthy Jeff Bezos launched the first satellites on Monday on its Kuiper constellation, which aims to offer a very high speed internet connection from space. She wants to land in the rival of the giant Starlink. With several years behind the group of billionaire Elon Musk, the American online sales giant sent several hundred kilometers above the earth the first 27 satellites of this network supposed to count more than 3,200.
The takeoff of the Atlas V rocket of the United Launch Alliance group carrying satellites took place at 7:01 p.m. local (01:01 Tuesday in Switzerland) in Cap Canaveral, Florida. The devices transported in space set the milestones of the “Kuiper project”, an infrastructure with issues that are both commercial, technological and geopolitical.
A project at more than $ 10 billion
Amazon, who has invested more than $ 10 billion there, aims to offer very high speed internet access to this mesh of satellites from all the points of the terrestrial globe, including remote areas and war or victims. The service should be set up during 2025. Its cost is still unknown, but should however be “accessible”, according to Amazon, which wants to keep the recipe that has made its success: broken prices.
-This promise is reminiscent of that of Elon Musk. With his Starlink constellation, the richest man in the world dominates the booming market of the internet by satellites and has a good length in advance, as in the field of rockets where Jeff Bezos and he competes with him.
6750 satellites in orbit for Starlink
Started several years ago, Starlink succeeded in the night from Sunday to Monday to 250th launch and has more than 6,750 satellites in orbit. Its services were notably deployed on land affected by natural disasters, as in September 2023 during an earthquake in Morocco, in January this year after fires in Los Angeles but also on the front in Ukraine.
Unlike traditional satellite telecommunications services, which are based on less numerous but larger and larger devices located more than 35,000 km from the earth, those offered by Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos operate in low orbit, which allows them to exchanges much faster data.
