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Comment by akreal | Hacker News Reader

They don't have to launch on BO, they can use any launch provider.

These massive constellations don't make financial sense if you have to throw away your rockets every time. That is, they could launch on another rocket, but they'd easily get beaten by SpaceX/Starlink.

Amazon is making enough money now that they don't have to make a lot of sense immediately. They may choose to speculate on a future economic opportunity with concern to missing out on that if they fail to put up the network. Their market dominance also means they can only spend so much of their profit on traditional acquisitions realistically, they're going to be increasingly restricted there.

They're also piling up immense amounts of cash, with not much to do with it other than begin kicking it back to shareholders (the same 'problem' Google, Microsoft, Apple and Facebook have had). Needless to say, Amazon clearly isn't eager to return it to shareholders via a dividend or buying back its stock. Five years from now? They'll be drowning in probably $40+ billion per year in operating profit. They can trivially afford whatever it costs to do the launches with someone other than BO, even if it's very expensive. It doesn't have to make financial sense today.

They won't launch on spacex, for sure. And there literally is no one else offering the capabilities to do it. The article mentions 10 billion dollars. That is only about 50 launches with the "competition" of SpaceX. Ok, you might get a discount, but still you would have to place 20+ satellites into a launch vehicle and have pretty much one launch per month to meet the requirements. "vaporware" sounds about right to me, tbh.

Why not? The money is green and if SpaceX is convinced they could still beat a competitor with Starlink might as well make some extra dough?

If Starlink can't beat Kupier they're dead anyway those satellites will go up eventually.

> if SpaceX is convinced they could still beat a competitor

That's not really the point though. Amazon is a fierce (and many times dirty) competitor to be up against.

If you're competing directly with AWS then you need to take every advantage you can get. If you're trying to build a global satellite network to provide internet access and not having launch capabilities will delay AWS long enough to get a foothold in the market then you take it.

T-minus X: "Starlink: offering free transit to Azure & GCP."

Eventually someone's going to launch an orbital data center to cut down on round trip latency. You think AWS bandwidth is expensive now lol.

Thought occurred to me, but I imagine heat dispersion would be cost-prohibitive vs terrestrial options.

I suppose {sat -> orbital DC -> sat} (latency) or {sat -> orbital DC processing -> ground} (transmission bandwidth) are the primary use cases? Maybe security?

India and Russia can also provide a much cheaper alternative to ULA.

You assume that Amazon has to use a US launch provider which isn’t the case.

I do not know that India has the capacity. Russia could, potentially, reduce the cost of Angara to about what an expendable Falcon 9 costs. Call it $50M per launch. But then you have to ship the satellites to Russia. Amazon still need to acquire 6 launches a year (assuming they can launch 60 satellites at once, which is totally unclear atm). That would be more than the currently planned launches and might require substantial investment into the production facilities.

So far there are at least five "maybes" in the equation:

1. amazon launching from Russia in large numbers 2. Khrunichev lowering the price of a single Angara significantly 3. Khrunichev being able to produce enough rockets in the first place 4. amazon being able to stack their satellites into the Angara 5. amazon being able to produce enough working satellites in the remaining time frame.

For me that still counts as vaporware.

The only launch provider that reuses rockets is SpaceX, so every other launch provider is at a total disadvantage.

You're right, but the article suggests otherwise. Their deadline to put half of the satellites in orbit is 2026 so it's plenty of time for BO to have launch capability but until they put ONE object in orbit it's all vaporware, unless Amazon says right now Kuiper is open to other launch providers, which I have not seen in any news source yet.

Half the satellites is still a lot of satellites. BO would need to ramp up to at least monthly launches sometime in the next two years. SpaceX is only doing a little better than that, and they started sending the Falcon 9 to orbit in 2010.

New Glenn is a lot bigger than Falcon, though. It has twice the capacity to LEO by weight and more than twice by volume. So if a Kuiper satellite is the same size as a Starlink one, they should be able to launch 120 per flight. 14 flights to get above 1618. That could be done within a single year, although that's a big ask for a company that hasn't hit orbit yet...

New Glenn competes with the Falcon Heavy

Starlink satellites don't use Falcon Heavy.

New Glenn is a paper rocket built around unproven engines.

I can't imagine SpaceX helping Amazon to create a competing satellite constellation while they are setting up starlink

Musk has stated that he has no objections to launching OneWeb's constellation. That may or may not also apply to Kuiper.

Cooperating with Bezos is a different thing though. It would be like nursing an injured rattlesnake back to health.

Hey now, that's not a very fair comparison; rattlesnakes leave you alone of you leave them alone.

In general, Musk's approach seems to be: force an industry to be leaps and bounds better by succeeding in that industry in a new way thought very difficult before.

Worked for Tesla as well as SpaceX. Same goal for Boring / Hyperloop.

Seems like ubiquitous satellite internet would also be a good thing, and SpaceX would make money on the launch to fund Starship. Win-win? Silly logic from an armchair quarterback, but I don;'t think it's as weird as you think.

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