After a number of profitable launches this 12 months, Mission Kuiper has its official title: Amazon Leo. It’s a nod to the time period Low-Earth Orbit (LEO), which refers to orbits at an altitude of 1,200 miles (2,000 kilometers) or much less. That’s the area the place Amazon’s constellation of 153 satellites orbit. The unique code title referred to the Kuiper Belt, an asteroid belt within the outer photo voltaic system previous Neptune.
Amazon plans to launch over 80 missions containing some 3,000 spacecraft. Leo has had six launches so far, together with three launches utilizing SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets with a complete of 72 satellites on board. Amazon’s primary rival on this house is SpaceX’s Starlink, which recently launched its 10,000th satellite.
Amazon is promising Leo will assist “prolong quick, dependable web to these past the attain of current networks,” very similar to Starlink has tried to over the previous a number of years. Starlink (and Amazon) could possibly obtain that under the right circumstances, and addressing a scarcity of fine web in lots of areas is an admirable purpose. Nevertheless, launching tens of hundreds of satellites into orbit may introduce some major issues, like an extreme quantity of particles, elevated threat of collisions in orbit, and heightened hazard for manned missions.