Bezos takes on Musk in battle 300 miles above Britain

Amazon is preparing to launch hundreds of small satellites into the sky next year

More than 300 miles above the Earth, two Amazon satellites – little more than pinpricks in the night sky – spiralled downwards towards a fiery death.
The planned “de-orbiting” of the two spacecraft over the summer marked the end of a lengthy period of experimentation and testing for the online retail giant for its secretive Project Kuiper division.
With the pilot mission over, Amazon is now ready to begin its space mission in earnest. The $2 trillion (£1.5 trillion) technology business, best known for its online store and Prime service, will next year launch hundreds of small satellites into the sky.
In total, Amazon plans to send up more than 3,000 low-Earth-orbit satellites to provide internet connectivity to people in remote places, with the first rocket mission pencilled in before the end of the year. Meanwhile, at a 172,000 sq ft factory near Seattle, the company is ramping up activity so that it can produce five $2m connectivity satellites each day.
After years of planning, Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s executive chairman, is finally going toe-to-toe with rival Elon Musk, whose company SpaceX has already launched a 6,000-satellite strong constellation and is valued at a reported $200bn.
The two billionaires, long-term space rivals who have traded barbs in public, could also soon by vying for dominance over the skies of Britain.
Musk’s business already has 42,000 customers in the UK, as of December last year. But it is seeking to dramatically expand its service. The Telegraph revealed in April that Musk’s company was looking at a major extension of its UK ground terminals with a view to ultimately launching a satellite service that can connect directly to Britons’ mobile phones.
Meanwhile, the UK’s telecom regulator, Ofcom, disclosed earlier this month it was considering granting a satellite licence to Amazon to bring its service to the UK, subject to a consultation.
Musk has a significant head start over Bezos. Not only does SpaceX have 6,000 satellites in so-called “low-Earth orbit”, 300 miles high, it also plans to launch hundreds more. Musk controls the vast majority of rocket launch capacity in the form of his SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets and has been launching Starlink satellites since 2019. Can Bezos catch up?
“[Amazon] are a long way behind SpaceX,” says Tim Farrar, founder of Silicon Valley consultancy TMF Associates. “It is going to take quite a few years to get this constellation up and running.”
Bezos, 60, has long been a space fanatic and is known for his love of the science fiction series Star Trek. He founded his own rocket company, Blue Origin, in 2000, which has the vision of “millions of people living and working in space for the benefit of Earth”. Yet Amazon only began work on Kuiper in 2018, almost two decades later.
A rivalry with SpaceX quickly followed. In 2018, Musk sacked seven senior leaders at the company in a row over his typically ambitious deadlines. Several decamped to Amazon.
Musk himself has repeatedly goaded Bezos personally, posting a “silver medal” emoji in 2021 when he overtook the billionaire as the world’s richest man and calling him a “copycat” after news emerged that Amazon was working on a Starlink rival.
Meanwhile, lobbyists for both companies have routinely attacked the other over their developments. Bezos’s Blue Origin sued Nasa in 2021 over its multibillion-dollar deal with SpaceX to take humans back to the Moon, alleging that the $3bn lunar lander contract had been awarded through an unfair process. Blue Origin ultimately lost the lawsuit.
More recently, Amazon has protested to US regulators about Starlink’s plans to expand its network with thousands more satellites. In response to one recent complaint, one of Musk’s lawyers wrote that Amazon has “filed hundreds of pages against SpaceX, concocting elaborate methods to hamstring SpaceX’s ability to connect Americans”.
Despite its standing start, some industry watchers believe Amazon has the opportunity to challenge Starlink – and certain advantages over Musk’s rival system.
Unlike SpaceX, Amazon also has a cash hoard expected to swell to $100bn this year that it can use to fund its venture. Musk, by contrast, has to keep raising capital or selling Tesla stock. The billionaire also, ultimately, wants to make a large profit from Starlink’s operations. “Starlink only makes sense for SpaceX if it generates cash,” says Chris Quilty, founder of research firm Quilty Space. He is hoping it will help fund his future gambits in space exploration.
For Amazon, however, a fat profit is less of a concern. There are big potential upsides of owning a global broadband network. It could connect hundreds of millions of people to reliable internet connections for the first time, bringing in subscription revenues and, ultimately, coax them into signing up to Amazon Prime.
“They can justify Kuiper based on its ability to sign up more Prime customers,” Quilty says. “There are a lot of ways Amazon can win.”
Amazon also has a substantial consumer hardware business and supply chain, which has produced tens of millions of Echo smart speakers and other gadgets. These need internet connectivity and expanding its reach could help Amazon sell more devices.
When Amazon began developing Kuiper, named for an asteroid belt surrounding Neptune, industry insiders say the company focused heavily on making its consumer terminal – the dishes used to connect its satellites to home broadband – as cheap as possible. 
A Kuiper spokesman said its terminal will cost less than $400 to produce. That compares to thousands of dollars for Starlink’s first terminals. Starlink has since said it is no longer losing money on each terminal.
Businesses, meanwhile, could benefit from using Amazon’s network as a communications backup or get bundled deals with its Amazon Web Services internet infrastructure offering.
It could also provide Amazon new opportunities for US defence work, with the American military machine keen to diversify beyond its reliance on Musk’s Starlink. “No one wants to be beholden to a single vendor – and not one as mercurial as Elon Musk,” Quilty adds.
Back on planet Earth, the rivalry between Musk and Bezos could soon be hotting up in the UK’s broadband and mobile market. Just a few years ago, using satellites to connect ordinary homes and even smartphones seemed unfeasible. But with thousands of satellites acting as tiny masts in space, it is now being seen as a potential alternative to spending hundreds of millions of pounds digging up miles of road to lay fibre to the most remote areas.
Some in the industry believe this could be more cost-effective than spending money from the Government’s delayed £1bn Shared Rural Network programme on connecting homes on remote islands or miles from any other settlement. Mobile networks have already begun testing terminals from SpaceX and its UK-based rival OneWeb for such a purpose.
The Telegraph previously revealed that SpaceX has held talks with EE about using its satellite network to boost rural coverage. It has already signed a deal with Virgin Media O2 to provide mobile “backhaul” to remote areas, carrying signals to masts in hard-to-reach locations.
Meanwhile, Bezos’s Kuiper has a deal with Vodafone for a similar coverage boost, extending its 4G and 5G coverage to remote corners of Europe.
Now, Ofcom, the mobile regulator, is consulting on allowing satellite giants like SpaceX greater access to the UK market, including letting them offer direct-to-mobile phone broadband from space.  
However, Amazon actually has to get its satellites into orbit first. It has already repeatedly delayed its initial mission to the final months of this year. A key difficulty is getting enough launch capacity. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has cut off its Soyuz programme of launches, while Europe’s Ariane rockets are not ready and Blue Origin’s own heavy New Glenn vehicle has yet to conduct a flight.
Musk’s SpaceX is the dominant US rocket company and Bezos has been forced to turn to his rival for help, signing a launch contract in December last year.
There have been reports that Bezos’s Blue Origin could launch a multibillion-dollar approach for another rocket business, ULA, which is backed by Boeing, but this has yet to materialise.
In the meantime, the cost of Kuiper is mounting. Amazon originally said it expected to spend at least $10bn on the programme. Analysts now believe that funding will almost be entirely exhausted by launch costs alone. A report from Quilty puts the likely figure at closer to $20bn. A Kuiper spokesman said it did not comment on speculation.
Even if Bezoes gets his satellite constellation into orbit, it remains unclear how well the service will work compared to Musk’s Starlink, which has already won 3m customers.
With 3,000 satellites against Starlink’s 6,000 Farrar, the space consultant, says: “The big question is how much capacity they are going to have and whether that is enough to take on Starlink.”
He adds: “The biggest issue is how big is the market opportunity. Starlink has 3m customers. Is there room to grow to 10m or 20m?”
Musk’s SpaceX has already been tested with years of trial and error to get Starlink into the place it is today. In the space industry, there is an old refrain: “Space is hard.” Amazon may be about to learn that first hand.