TAMPA, Fla. — Amazon no longer faces a July 30 cutoff for deploying half its planned 3,232 broadband satellites, but the reprieve comes with a temporary loss of spectrum priority that could give SpaceX and other rivals more leverage in orbit.
The Federal Communications Commission granted the company a waiver June 5 after only 331 Amazon Leo satellites had been launched since deployments got underway last year, or just over 10% of the proposed Gen 1 constellation.
Amazon said the constellation had been held back primarily by a lack of available rockets, despite signing launch contracts worth several billion dollars and making manufacturing progress on the satellites it builds in-house.
A deadline to deploy the full constellation by July 30, 2029, remains in place, which the company said it is still on track to meet following the recent grounding of Blue Origin’s New Glenn, one of several newer rockets its launch manifest relies on.
The FCC set the deployment deadlines in 2020, when it initially approved the constellation known then as Project Kuiper, as part of measures to prevent companies from warehousing spectrum after being awarded access to the critical communications resource.
