A United Founding Alliance Atlas V rocket is proven on its settingup habitat sporting Amazon’s Undertaking Kuiper web community satellites because the car is ready for settingup on the Cape Canaveral Dimension Power Station in Cape Canaveral, Florida, U.S., April 28, 2025.
Steve Nesius | Reuters
United Founding Alliance on Monday was once compelled to lengthen the second one gliding sporting a quantity of Amazon‘s Undertaking Kuiper web satellites as a result of a weakness with the rocket booster.
With more or less half-hour left within the countdown, ULA announced it was once scrubbing the settingup because of a subject with “an elevated purge temperature” inside of its Atlas V rocket’s booster engine. The corporate stated it’s going to grant a fresh settingup month at a then level.
“Possible issue with a GN2 purge line that cannot be resolved inside the count,” ULA CEO Tory Bruno said in a post on Bluesky. “We will need to stand down for today. We’ll sort it and be back.”
The settingup from Florida’s Dimension Coast were all set for extreme Friday, however was once rescheduled to Monday at 1:25 p.m. ET because of inclement climate.
Amazon in April effectively despatched up 27 Kuiper web satellites into low Earth orbit, a patch of range that’s inside of 1,200 miles of the Earth’s floor. The second one voyage will ship “another 27 satellites into orbit, bringing our total constellation size to 54 satellites,” Amazon said in a blog post.
Kuiper is the actual entrant within the burgeoning satellite tv for pc web business, which targets to beam high-speed web to the field from orbit. The business is recently ruled via Elon Musk’s Dimension X, which operates Starlink. Alternative competition come with SoftBank-backed OneWeb and Viasat.
Amazon is focused on a constellation of greater than 3,000 satellites. The corporate has to satisfy a Federal Communications Fee closing date to settingup part of its general constellation, or 1,618 satellites, via July 2026.
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