Inc. Magazine
A fierce rivalry took a practical turn as SpaceX launched Amazon’s Project Kuiper satellites, despite the two competing in satellite internet. Amazon, racing a 2026 FCC deadline, turned to SpaceX after other providers fell short. Business sense prevailed over rivalry, highlighting SpaceX’s dominance in launch capability and Amazon’s urgency to deploy its satellite network.
A Collab Among Competitors? Why Amazon Is Partnering With SpaceX on Satellite Launches
Author: Chloe Aiello
A SpaceX rocket blasted off from Cape Canaveral in the early morning hours on Wednesday. The launch was routine, given SpaceX leads the world in rocket launches by volume. Its payload, however, was a different story.
SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket carried 24 satellites from Amazon’s Project Kuiper—a direct competitor to SpaceX’s own Starlink. About an hour after liftoff Wednesday morning, the Elon Musk-helmed aerospace company confirmed on social media platform X that the satellites had been successfully deployed.
“Successful deployment of all KF-01 satellites confirmed,” SpaceX wrote.
SpaceX has made the deployment of such satellites, meant to furnish remote and underserved regions with global broadband internet access, relatively commonplace. But the launch sent important signals both about Amazon’s commitment to building Project Kuiper’s constellation, and about SpaceX’s ongoing supremacy in global launch.
“It definitely shows that Amazon is serious about getting Kuiper online if it’s going to a company that is its biggest competitor in this space for help to do this and do it at the speed that it wants,” says Clayton Swope, deputy director of the Aerospace Security Project at CSIS.
The SpaceX mission marked the third successful launch of Project Kuiper satellites. Amazon launched its first batch of 27 Project Kuiper satellites aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket in late April. The second launch, in mid-June, was similar. Wednesday’s launch marked the first time SpaceX carried Kuiper satellites—but it won’t be the last.
This doesn’t mean the relationship between SpaceX and Amazon is an easy alliance. Amazon booked three such launches with its rival in December 2023, Reuters reported, but only after shareholders filed a lawsuit alleging executive chairman Jeff Bezos and CEO Andy Jassy breached fiduciary duty by excluding “the most obvious and affordable launch provider, SpaceX, from its procurement process because of Bezos’s personal rivalry with Musk,” Spaceflight Now reported.
Amazon denied the allegations and sought dismissal of the suit.
“They basically went out and contracted with everyone they could, but the fact of the matter is that all those other launch providers can’t launch frequently enough to support the Kuiper constellation deployment plan,” says Todd Harrison, senior fellow at policy thinktank AEI. “They came back after the fact and contracted with SpaceX.”
It makes sense that Amazon might pursue every avenue—even tapping a rival—to launch its Kuiper constellation. The company is in a race against the clock to deploy as many of its satellites as possible before a July 30, 2026, deadline. That deadline was imposed by the Federal Communications Commission, and marks the date that the company has to have more than half of its planned 3,236 satellites deployed and operational. To date, it has just under 80. Should the company miss its deadline, it could lose the authorization to launch its full amount.
As for why SpaceX may want to support the build-out of a rival satellite network, Swope says it all comes down to business. If Amazon is going to set up Project Kuiper to compete with Starlink, SpaceX might as well benefit from it.
“Amazon’s going to do that anyway. It seems kind of like a no-brainer, where SpaceX gets to benefit from that process, something that would already be happening,” he says, adding that SpaceX’s “core business is launch.”
Although Amazon did tap Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin for 12 Kuiper launches with the option for 15 more, its New Glenn rocket has experienced significant delays.
“It highlights just how far ahead SpaceX is in terms of cost, reliability, and frequency of launch,” Harrison says. “The volume of launches that SpaceX has every year, it far surpasses everyone else, including other nations like China.”
And for space history buffs, SpaceX’s launch came on an auspicious date. CSIS’s Swope pointed out that SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket carried Project Kuiper satellites to space just one day before the anniversary of a historic moment of space camaraderie. Exactly 50 years ago today, Soviet cosmonaut Aleksei Leonov and American astronaut Thomas Stafford shook hands in orbit as part of the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project during a period of detente in the Cold War. The handshake is widely viewed as a symbol that the goals of space exploration are lofty enough to overcome even the bitterest of rivalries on Earth.
Credits: TCA, LLC.