TAMPA, Fla. — Commercial Project Kuiper satellites are entering production next month without design changes after two recently launched prototypes aced end-to-end tests, the broadband constellation’s vice president of technology said in an interview.
KuiperSat-1 and KuiperSat-2 successfully demonstrated fiber-like speeds after launching to low Earth orbit last month, Rajeev Badyal told SpaceNews, enabling work to start on more than 3,200 production satellites with similar architecture.
He said the tests put Amazon’s constellation plans on track to start launches in the first half of 2024, enabling beta services later that year with early partners that include telcos Vodafone and Verizon.
Badyal declined to discuss the number of satellites Project Kuiper aims to have in orbit for these early services, but said they would be grouped together to give potential customers seamless connectivity in certain areas.
“There’ll be plenty of satellites for our selected customers to start doing their use case tests on a continuous basis,” Badyal said, such as cellular backhaul.
Demonstrations using Project Kuiper’s prototypes since their launch last month were limited to 30-120-second contact windows as the two satellites passed over a test site in McAllen, Texas.
Although Amazon has not released performance metrics for these tests, Badyal said broadband speeds were comparable with terrestrial networks.
The company unveiled three prototype customer terminals early this year that boast speeds of up to 1 gigabit per second (Gbps).
During the week of Nov. 5, Amazon sent data traffic in both directions over its space network: from the internet over an Amazon-owned fiber network to a ground station, up to the prototype satellites, and then to a prototype customer terminal in McAllen.
In the first demonstration, engineers using the satellites logged into an Amazon Prime…
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