Bezos and Musk compete to put satellites

In the new arena, Bezos accelerated his pace of catching up with Musk.

On April 5, local time, according to the Wall Street Journal, Amazon announced that it had finalized a total of 83 launch agreements with Blue Origin, European satellite launch company Arianespace, and United Launch Alliance, costing billions of dollars.

It was the largest commercial rocket purchase order in history, and the deal essentially bought out the vast majority of large rocket launches in the United States and Europe over the next five years. Amazon's move has also been interpreted by the outside world as another declaration of war by the former world's richest man, Bezos, to Musk, the world's richest man, and the battlefield between the two sides has come to the satellite Internet.

The reason why Bezos is willing to pay a sky-high price to deploy his satellite network, some analysts believe that on the one hand, he and Musk have frequently lagged behind in the rocket project confrontation, and they urgently need to take back a city. On the other hand, Bezos also sees the potential of a future where satellite networks can reach millions of customers, a rare incremental market.

The deal is part of Amazon's Project Kuiper. In April 2019, Amazon announced the launch of the plan, saying that it would send 3236 satellites into low Earth orbit and provide a satellite communication network covering the whole world, which is exactly the same as musk's idea of "this is like rebuilding the Internet in space" when musk launched Starlink in 2015. To this end, Musk also tweeted at Ait Bezos, angrily accusing Bezos of being a "plagiarism dog."

Other peers didn't want to see Bezos for a piece of the pie. OneWeb has said that the Kuiper plan will seriously interfere with the cooperation they are already negotiating. Like throwing 3236 new balls of different shapes at a juggler during a performance, "this multiplies the complexity of the software." ”

Amazon's own situation is not favored by some. As a latecomer, "when Amazon started, they may have been years behind." Roger Rusch, an adviser to the established satellite company TelAstra, said.

As of January this year, Musk's Space X satellite Internet project Starlink (Starlink) has deployed more than 2,000 satellites and has more than 145,000 contracted customers worldwide. The first launch of Bezos' Amazon Kuiper plan will not be until the fourth quarter of this year at the earliest, when it will launch two prototype satellites if all goes well.

Not long ago, Ukraine's Internet service was destroyed by the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, and Musk announced that starlink would be put into use in Ukraine to facilitate local people to access the network, which further made the starlink project out of the circle.

In May 2018, Space X expects the total cost of StarLink's development and expansion to approach $10 billion. At present, In order to compete with Musk, Bezos will not hesitate to spend tens of billions of dollars to speed up, but whether it is business or prestige, Bezos is still in an absolute disadvantage.

A

"Lately, we've heard a lot of stories of people who can't finish their jobs or school because they don't have a reliable internet at home, and Kuiper will change that, and our $10 billion investment will create infrastructure across the United States to help us close that gap." In 2020, after the Kuiper project was approved by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Dave Limp, senior vice president of Amazon, said, "We're going to race." ”

After that, the Kuiper project fell into a long silence, which was the opposite of the vibrancy it was when it came out.

In April 2019, Amazon announced that they would deploy a large broadband satellite internet called Kuiper, which would compete directly with Space X's StarLink, and it is expected that it will take up to a decade to deploy the planned 3236 satellites.

But before the project can start, it must be approved by the FCC, and the approval process is quite tortuous.

Their long-standing FCC counterparts Space X and Oneweb have lobbied the FCC to reject Amazon's application. According to the FCC, Space X executives met with FCC Chairman Ajit Pai at least three times, all in order to oppose Kuiper's application, on the grounds that if one of Amazon's satellites interfered with the satellite network previously established by Space X, the follow-up launch program would be halted.

After some pestering, the FCC passed Kuiper's approval, provided that it would not interfere excessively with previously authorized satellite companies. The Kuiper satellite is scheduled to be launched in five phases. Under the terms of the FCC's order, Amazon must launch half of its satellites to be operational by July 2026, or the Kuiper program could lose the right to launch satellites.

That means that for the next four years, Amazon will launch an average of one satellite per day. That's perhaps one reason Amazon spends billions of dollars to buy out the vast majority of large rocket launches in the U.S. and Europe over the next five years.

Also worth mentioning is the leadership team of the Coyber project. Today, Kuiper's president, Rajeev Badyal, is the former vice president of Space X's Starlink division, CNBC reported. In 2018, due to disappointment with the speed of StarLink's development, Musk fired him.

The 83 launch agreements in total were the biggest news in a long time when the Coiber project had been dormant. Among them, the Ariane Ariane 6 rocket undertook 18 launches, the New Glenn rocket of Blue Origin undertook 12 launches, and an additional 15 launches, and the United Launch Alliance Vulcan rocket undertook 38 launches. In addition to Blue Origin, the other two rockets will be flying for the first time, and Blue Origin's new Glenn is expected to make its first flight as soon as the end of the year.

In an interview with CNBC on Tuesday local time, Limp said that Amazon aims to launch several test satellites into orbit in the next year or so, "We still have a lot of work to do, but these cooperation agreements reflect our commitment and strong belief in the Kuiper project." ”

As of April 2022, Coyber's launch date has not yet been determined, and two prototype test satellites are expected to launch in the fourth quarter of this year.

B

In addition to Musk and Bezos, there are not many players in the Internet satellite track, and there are more and more trends.

There are currently two influential competitors in the industry: OneWeb, a British company founded in 2012, and Telesat, a Canadian satellite company. Unlike other young companies, Telesat has more than 50 years of experience in satellite operations. It will begin launching 298 low-Earth orbit broadband satellites in 2023 and is scheduled to achieve full coverage by 2024.

Oneweb is ill-fated. In March 2020, due to SoftBank's losses and the difficulty of providing financial support, Oneweb was forced to file for bankruptcy protection and was saved from bankruptcy under the leadership of the British government. Because the value of wireless spectrum may be as high as about $1 billion, Oneweb has attracted many bids from forces, including Space X and Amazon.

Outside analysis, Amazon's participation in the bidding is mainly to quickly promote the Kuiper project. To compete with Space X, Amazon has no chips: in terms of cost, the former Falcon 9 may cost less than $30 million per launch, and Amazon is at least three times higher than the other; in terms of frequency, Space X is already far ahead.

Falcon 9

Acquiring Oneweb may be Bezos' fastest way to catch up with Musk. But in the end, Oneweb and Space X reached a cooperation, and Bezos was even worse.

A more famous competitor is Motorola's Iridium project, which later went bankrupt due to financial problems and became the exclusive communications network of the US military. In addition, Facebook announced in 2016 that it would launch satellites; Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who participated in leading an $85.2 million funding round for satellite services company Kymeta: Walmart also has its own satellite.

In addition, there are many more wave of industry startups that have been born under the influence of leading companies such as Space X. Satellites are the second-largest share of venture capital after Rocket, with investors pouring nearly $15 billion into the space industry in the first half of 2021 alone, involving 230 deals, according to Space Capital. Similar companies include U.S. startups Astra and ABL Space Systems, and Orbex and Skyrora in the U.K.

China is also laying out its layout in the field of satellite Internet. In the national team, the "Hongyan" and "Hongyun" constellation plans of the two major groups of China Aerospace Science and Technology and China Aerospace Science and Industry will launch 300 and 156 low-orbit satellites respectively to form a satellite interconnection network, which is expected to be completed in 2023.

Among the commercial satellite companies are Beijing Nine Days MSI Technology, Galaxy Aerospace, etc., and Geely has also entered the game.

At the end of 2018, about 80 space technology start-ups in China had invested in this field. What attracts them is the satellite industry chain market behind them of up to $400 billion. According to Liu Chang, vice president of Galaxy Aerospace, the size of the global space industry is nearly 400 billion US dollars, which is a large market of more than 2.5 trillion yuan.

C

According to the Wall Street Journal, Musk's StarLink network service speed is comparable to that of U.S. broadband. In layman's terms, the satellite Internet is equivalent to moving the earth's base station to space. Traditional telecommunications and Earth observation satellites typically orbit farther from Earth, about 22,000 miles from the equator. Near-Earth satellites such as Starlink are closer to Earth, up to 1200 miles, with stronger signals and less delays.

All sides rushed to run the satellite, on the one hand, this is indeed a blue ocean. According to satellite industry consultancy NSR, 100 million to 200 million IoT devices will have access to satellites in 2022. Satellite orbits, on the other hand, are "non-renewable resources". According to the International Telecommunication Union, satellite frequencies and orbital use rights are "first-come, first-served".

Once the satellite network is successfully formed, the later benefits are quite considerable. Take Musk's StarLink, for example, the construction cost of StarLink is more than $10 billion, but the outside world predicts that it will eventually be able to carry 3% of the world's Internet traffic transmission, bringing at least $10 billion or even $30 billion in revenue per year, which is expected to become space X's future cash cow.

But as companies project satellites into space, a series of problems follow.

StarLink's 12,000 satellites are equivalent to 2 times the total number of satellites launched by human history and 10 times the number of satellites in service. Neil Lane, a senior researcher in science and technology at Rice University, once questioned: "How much do you really want to put on it?" Other astronomers have also disputed, arguing that the satellites interfered with their observations.

In response, Gwynne Shotwell, president of SpaceX, said the company is working to solve this problem.

The impact of satellites on astronomical observations is still a relatively mild drawback, and the impact of satellite collisions is even more severe. Some experts began to worry that in the movie "Gravity", the serial collision caused by space debris in orbit would be staged in reality.

Moriba Jah, an aerospace engineer at the University of Texas at Austin, said: "If two satellites do collide, they could splash debris into the path of other satellites, and there could even be a cascade of collisions that pile up on the orbital highway." ”

Space X has deployed an autonomous collision avoidance system on satellites in an attempt to circumvent or mitigate similar problems, performing more than 7,000 collision avoidance operations in the past year alone.

In July and October last year, Space X's starlink satellites were close to the Chinese space station twice, and for safety reasons, the Chinese space station implemented emergency avoidance measures twice, which posed a huge threat to the safety of astronauts' lives. It is reasonable to say that space X's 1095 satellite in July should have operated in a low-Earth orbit of 555 kilometers, which was originally distinct from the space station, but it suddenly dropped to 382 kilometers, only about ten kilometers away from the Chinese space station, which is equivalent to a space traffic jam.

At present, there is a lack of uniform international rules on how to use the Earth's low Earth orbit. But as Musk and Bezos compete on the new battlefield, it's time to solve these problems one by one.

Resources:

1.Amazon to Spend Billions on Space Launches as SpaceX Ramps Up Satellite-Internet Service，The Wall Street Journal

2. Jeff Bezos and Amazon just hired everybody but SpaceX for Project Kuiper，Ars Technica

3. The battlefield of the Internet has shifted, and those who get the sky have the world, plus the United States Finance

4. Internet satellites, crowded skyline track, Global Tiger Finance

5. Amazon has argued with SpaceX over its Starlink satellite program, accusing it of breaking the rules, DeepTech Deep Tech

6. Space war between Bezos and Musk, Tencent Technology