Amazon Kuiper places largest commercial launch order with ULA, Arianespace, Blue

[Robotbeat]

This is all good for medium RLVs like New Glenn, Neutron, and Terran-R. (Vulcan SMART kinda half counts.)

Reusable rockets need lots and lots of launch demand.

[LouScheffer]

This will bring up some interesting supply chain issues.  RUAG, for example, will need to make an additional 54 fairing sets, since they make the fairings both for Ariane and Vulcan.   Are there enough trained workers to build that many rockets and satellites?  It may be necessary to import workers or build at other sites.  Can the folks who build space-qualified components keep up?

A RUAG failure could cause a stand-down for both Vulcan and Ariane launches, a BE-4 failure for both New Glenn and Vulcan, and hurricane damage could halt SpaceX, Vulcan, and New Glenn.  Lots of potential choke points here.  Interesting times ahead!

[ZachF]

This will bring up some interesting supply chain issues.  RUAG, for example, will need to make an additional 54 fairing sets, since they make the fairings both for Ariane and Vulcan.   Are there enough trained workers to build that many rockets and satellites?  It may be necessary to import workers or build at other sites.  Can the folks who build space-qualified components keep up?

A RUAG failure could cause a stand-down for both Vulcan and Ariane launches, a BE-4 failure for both New Glenn and Vulcan, and hurricane damage could halt SpaceX, Vulcan, and New Glenn.  Lots of potential choke points here.  Interesting times ahead!

RUAG is building a new facility in the USA for Vulcan, so they will at least have double the amount of fairing factories.

[matthewkantar]

Is it really "Smart reuse" if you throw away all of the tankage, the interstage and SIX, count em, six solid boosters every time you launch? Does anybody have a guess as to how much six 5' X 72' carbon fiber boosters will cost?

[GWH]

Is it really "Smart reuse" if you throw away all of the tankage, the interstage and SIX, count em, six solid boosters every time you launch? Does anybody have a guess as to how much six 5' X 72' carbon fiber boosters will cost?

Information a few years old says $3M cost each,  $5M price to customer.  So $30M. Probably less with volume but then again inflation is whacky right now.  Much cheaper than the AJR boosters Atlas V flew with.

Still a pretty large amount of exendable hardware compared to New Glenn.

[Welsh Dragon]

Is it really "Smart reuse" if you throw away all of the tankage, the interstage and SIX, count em, six solid boosters every time you launch? Does anybody have a guess as to how much six 5' X 72' carbon fiber boosters will cost?

Have I missed something? How do we know it's the 6 booster version that will be flying these contracts? Based on presumed launch weight?

[ThatOldJanxSpirit]

Remember the previous "largest commercial launch order in history", and how "well" that worked out for the company buying the launches? (OneWeb Just Placed What It’s Calling the Largest Commercial Launch Order in History)

Yeah, I'm seeing a high probability history will repeat itself: If you make decisions that doesn't make sense economically, sooner or later it'll come home to roost and bite you in the behind. And this time don't count on Musk being magnanimous and lend a helping hand, he may be willing to help a non-competitive competitor who has already fired Greg Wyler, but it's doubtful there's the willingness to pull Bezos out of the mess of his own making.

I don’t see this as an economics issue. Amazon has money to burn and has decided it wants to occupy some prime LEO real estate for itself. Tighter regulations on LEO constellations would seem to be a realistic possibility. Having a large extant  constellation could be a huge advantage if that happens.

[woods170]

This will bring up some interesting supply chain issues.  RUAG, for example, will need to make an additional 54 fairing sets, since they make the fairings both for Ariane and Vulcan.   Are there enough trained workers to build that many rockets and satellites?  It may be necessary to import workers or build at other sites.  Can the folks who build space-qualified components keep up?

A RUAG failure could cause a stand-down for both Vulcan and Ariane launches, a BE-4 failure for both New Glenn and Vulcan, and hurricane damage could halt SpaceX, Vulcan, and New Glenn.  Lots of potential choke points here.  Interesting times ahead!

RUAG is building a new facility in the USA for Vulcan, so they will at least have double the amount of fairing factories.

Minor nit: that "new facility in the USA for Vulcan" already exists.

RUAG Space moved production of fairings for Atlas V (and Vulcan!) to the USA in 2017. They are operating out a former ULA Delta facility in Decatur, located right next to ULA's rocket factory. This factory is already in the process of switching from producing Atlas V fairings to Vulcan fairings. Its production capacity is scaled such that it can keep up with the production capacity of ULA's rocket factory.

The other fairing factory of RUAG is situated in Switzerland. Where it continues to produce fairings for Ariane 5 and Ariane 6.

Production capacity is no issue for RUAG Space.

[Asteroza]

Is it really "Smart reuse" if you throw away all of the tankage, the interstage and SIX, count em, six solid boosters every time you launch? Does anybody have a guess as to how much six 5' X 72' carbon fiber boosters will cost?

Have I missed something? How do we know it's the 6 booster version that will be flying these contracts? Based on presumed launch weight?

'cuz Tory sez so

https://twitter.com/torybruno/status/1511509009307561984

[Star One]

I think the forum should bring in a sweepstakes to pick how quickly someone will mention Starship in a thread as a solution to a particular launch contract or in fact anything else.

Why shouldn't Starship get mentioned? It will be one of many LVs offering commercial services in the relevant timeframe. Seems to me that discussing the competition and alternatives would be highly relevant in a thread about the "largest commercial launch order"...

For example, will there also be an award for mentioning Japan's H3 or ISRO's GSLV Mk3? Because Amazon's apparent strategy of "all of the above" for making certain they have sufficient and timely launches available from *somebody* seemingly only lacks contracts with those two. (China and Russia being out for obvious reasons, of course.)

Of the two, H3 is more of a surprise to me, as JAXA/Mitsubishi are really trying to design it with an eye towards commercialization. ISRO doesn't seem to have much excess capacity for their GSLVs to be of much interest.

And what about an award for mentioning OneWeb? Their Gen2 constellation of ~6300 sats is supposed to start launching mid-decade in the same timeframe as Kuiper's launches, but Amazon calling dibs on 68 flights worldwide has to suck a lot of the oxygen out of the available launch capacity.

ULA, in particular, with their 35 pre-existing launches and now 38 more, is looking at launching an average of ~12 Vulcans a year if those are all launched between 2023 and mid-2029 (i.e. when Kuiper needs to be complete by), and I don't think ULA is going to hit a 12 per year pace for Vulcan right out of the gate. Add in the remaining Atlas 5 launches and you're looking at something approaching SpaceX's (them, again!) launch rates. It should really keep Canaveral's range operators busy for the foreseeable future -- between SpaceX, ULA and Blue, will there be time for anything else?

Ariane 6's 18 launches is 4.5 per year if ending in 2026, or 2.5 if by 2029. Add in their GTO and European government launches, and I'm not certain how many more they could sell. And A64 really is kinda small for LEO -- at 21t it's only about the same capacity as an expendable Falcon 9 -- so even if OneWeb managed to get a half dozen A64 launches a year, that's not going put much of dent in their requirements.

Amazon didn't tap any of the upcoming medium launchers -- Neutron, Terran R, Beta -- so maybe they'll have capacity mid-decade. They'll certainly want to sell OneWeb a bunch of flights, at any rate.

I think SpaceX is out for Kuiper launches, though.  Blue, ULA and ArianeGroup would need to all seriously mess up their respective launchers' debuts and/or fail to quickly ramp their launch cadence -- and even then, H3 should have capacity, and ISRO might actually get their SCE-200 powered launcher ready. On the other hand, if things do go pear shaped (highly unlikely, given ULA's and ArianeGroup's reputations), then Amazon might need to pull a OneWeb and buy from SpaceX to meet their 2026 deadline. In the end, all the money in the world won't help if there's nothing else to buy.

And then there's New Glenn, but will competitors consider Blue to be as unfavourable as SpaceX? Blue is one step removed from Amazon/Kuiper, after all, and Telesat is (hopefully) launching on NG, so maybe not.

On the other hand, OneWeb has already held their nose and bought SpaceX launches -- and OneWeb doesn't have Amazon's mountain of cash to throw at all the high-cost vehicles. I'm thinking that OneWeb might have to seriously start getting their own launchers under contract for their Gen2 constellation, or be caught short when they want to start launching.

I wonder how much OneWeb's Soyuz situation situation spurred Amazon to spread the love, or just added emphasis as to why not going sole-source is a good idea. And I wonder if OneWeb will necessarily be following suit for Gen2.


All-in-all, this launch contract is certainly momentous, for both the launch market, as well as other megaconstellation operators.

As I said above for financial, time and probably personal reasons Starship would never come under consideration for these launches.

[Star One]

Remember the previous "largest commercial launch order in history", and how "well" that worked out for the company buying the launches? (OneWeb Just Placed What It’s Calling the Largest Commercial Launch Order in History)

Yeah, I'm seeing a high probability history will repeat itself: If you make decisions that doesn't make sense economically, sooner or later it'll come home to roost and bite you in the behind. And this time don't count on Musk being magnanimous and lend a helping hand, he may be willing to help a non-competitive competitor who has already fired Greg Wyler, but it's doubtful there's the willingness to pull Bezos out of the mess of his own making.

I don’t think One Web as they were then and Amazon as they are now are at all comparable.

[DJPledger]

Why didn't Amazon just do the sensible thing and go with SpaceX for launching Kuiper? Going with SpaceX for the whole Kuiper project would save Amazon many billions of $ and very likely get the whole Kuiper constellation launched considerably sonner. F9 is fully proven and launching about once per week on average while Vulcan, NG, and A6 have not even launched yet with the earliest possible launch of any of these 3 being Vulcan at the back end of this year. Also not to mention SS which may launch before any of those 3 mentioned above.

[kevinof]

My guess?  It’s the Jeff vs Elon show and all that “where’s my engines” stuff on twitter might have made Spacex verboten. Plus why give your competitor a look at your sats and how you have optimised them.

The next Amazon shareholder meeting will be interesting.

Why didn't Amazon just do the sensible thing and go with SpaceX for launching Kuiper? Going with SpaceX for the whole Kuiper project would save Amazon many billions of $ and very likely get the whole Kuiper constellation launched considerably sonner. F9 is fully proven and launching about once per week on average while Vulcan, NG, and A6 have not even launched yet with the earliest possible launch of any of these 3 being Vulcan at the back end of this year. Also not to mention SS which may launch before any of those 3 mentioned above.

[Robotbeat]

If I were an Amazon shareholder, though, I’d be asking hard questions. That’s a LOT of money to shovel into the ocean over a billionaire’s grudge.

Edit: moved from an L2 thread (because there’s nothing L2 about it):

Diversification is good, but a little sad that RLVs other than New Glenn (such as Neutron, Terran-R, and possibly a reusable Firefly rocket, plus whatever Stoke is doing) weren’t further along and selected. It’s sad to see such massive amount of money used to prop up dead end expendable rockets instead of supporting the reusable rockets that could truly compete with SpaceX. …although quite a few satellites will be launched with New Glenn.

[Borgias]

As it says the big loser in all of this seems to be the small launchers. I wonder if that’s why RL have decided to already go bigger with Neutron.

Not really because there will be a saturation of the medium lifters capacity who won’t be able to accept new contracts without important delays.

[spacenut]

We have Amazon Echo's in our home.  They have the worst search engine, either don't know or give you a wrong answer.  I would hope Kuiper is better.   Google and Sirus are better search engines.  Also, they have never really improved over time.  Seems like Bezos sells a product that is not ready, and is he going to be able to manufacture all these satellites in just a few years? 

What if there are problems with Vulcan that could delay even further?  What if there are problem with Ariane 6?  I trust ULA to make a good rocket, but not enough information on BE-4 yet. 

[su27k]

Remember the previous "largest commercial launch order in history", and how "well" that worked out for the company buying the launches? (OneWeb Just Placed What It’s Calling the Largest Commercial Launch Order in History)

Yeah, I'm seeing a high probability history will repeat itself: If you make decisions that doesn't make sense economically, sooner or later it'll come home to roost and bite you in the behind. And this time don't count on Musk being magnanimous and lend a helping hand, he may be willing to help a non-competitive competitor who has already fired Greg Wyler, but it's doubtful there's the willingness to pull Bezos out of the mess of his own making.

I don’t see this as an economics issue. Amazon has money to burn and has decided it wants to occupy some prime LEO real estate for itself. Tighter regulations on LEO constellations would seem to be a realistic possibility. Having a large extant  constellation could be a huge advantage if that happens.

They can occupy LEO real estate equally well - if not faster - by launching on SpaceX. And "having money to burn" is a very bad investment strategy, remember OneWeb was once backed by SoftBank, which had a $100B investment fund, they also "had money to burn", but a few bad investment and an economic downturn forced them to abandon OneWeb, which led to the latter's bankruptcy. Nobody is immune from the consequences of bad economical decisions, Amazon is no exception.

[arachnitect]

Why didn't Amazon just do the sensible thing and go with SpaceX for launching Kuiper? Going with SpaceX for the whole Kuiper project would save Amazon many billions of $ and very likely get the whole Kuiper constellation launched considerably sonner. F9 is fully proven and launching about once per week on average while Vulcan, NG, and A6 have not even launched yet with the earliest possible launch of any of these 3 being Vulcan at the back end of this year. Also not to mention SS which may launch before any of those 3 mentioned above.

Is there a source for SpaceX offering better price/schedule/terms than Amazon got through the other 3?

[Robotbeat]

SpaceX would have definitely been able to offer a better price and schedule. However, they may not have done so.

[abaddon]

SpaceX would have definitely been able to offer a better price and schedule. However, they may not have done so.

I'm wondering if SpaceX just offered Starship.  In that case I could see Amazon being conservative and going with a couple of "new launchers built by reliable old space companies" with some New Glenn being thrown in because Bezos.  Ariane 6 is a conservative design and Vulcan is as well.  Throw in Vulcan supporting Blue Origin as a secondary bonus, and Starship might not look that appealing, given some skepticism about SpaceX hitting their (massively ambitious) targets.

Worth remembering there are no satellites yet and we don't have any hints (well, I don't, please correct if I am wrong) when there will be.  Falcon 9 is a no-brainer right now, but if Amazon isn't going to have satellites ready for a while, it makes less sense.