LAUNCH OF TWO PROTOTYPE SATELLITES FOR AMAZON’s PROJECT KUIPER, Oct 6, 2023, CCSFS, 2:00 pm ET

The United Launch Alliance (ULA) is targeting October 6, 2023 at 2:00 pm ET for the Atlas V launch of two prototype satellites for Amazon’s Project Kuiper, a competitor to SpaceX’s Starlink and other broadband satellite constellations.

ULA will webcast the launch.

The “Kuipersat” satellites were supposed to launch on the inaugural flight of ULA’s Vulcan rocket earlier this year, but that launch has been repeatedly delayed and Amazon is under a deadline to launch half of its 3,236 satellites by 2026. Last year Amazon purchased a record number of launches from ULA (Atlas Vs and Vulcans), Blue Origin (owned by Jeff Bezos), and Europe’s Arianespace to achieve that requirement.  With the delays to Vulcan, it decided to use one of the Atlas V rockets to get started even though the two satellites comsume only a small fraction of the available payload capacity.

They are calling this a “Protoflight” mission since they are test satellites designed “to add real-world data from space to Amazon’s results from its extensive lab testing, fieldwork and simulation, and help Amazon finalize plans ahead of a full-scale satellite deployment beginning in 2024.”