The American e-commerce juggernaut, diversified in IT services, formalized on Tuesday morning "the signing of agreements with Arianespace, Blue Origin and United Launch Alliance (ULA) for the provision of heavy load launch services as part of the Project Kuiper, Amazon's initiative to increase global broadband access through a constellation of satellites in low Earth orbit, at an altitude of approximately 600 km.

“The contracts provide for up to 83 launches over a five-year period, allowing Amazon to deploy the majority of its constellation of 3,236 satellites,” the company said in a statement, claiming “the largest commercial acquisition of launchers ever. Of the history".

ULA won the largest share of contracts, with 38 launches.

This joint venture between the American giants Boeing and Lockheed Martin, which operates from Cape Canaveral in Florida (south-east), will invest to have a second platform on this emblematic site of space history and which will allow "operations at a high rate" for its Vulcan Centaur heavy launcher.

For its part, Blue Origin, which like Amazon was founded by billionaire Jeff Bezos, was awarded 37 launches, including 15 as options for its giant New Glenn launcher.

But Blue Origin will also benefit from the ULA part of the contract since it builds the Vulcan Centaur engines.

The only non-American player in these agreements, Arianespace, responsible for marketing European launchers, is entrusted with 18 launches, "a great moment in the history" of the company, commented its executive chairman, Stéphane Israel, quoted in the communicated.

They will be carried out by Ariane 6, the new launcher manufactured like Ariane 5 at Les Mureaux in the Paris region, and which must carry out its first qualification launch at the end of the year from the Kourou space center in French Guiana.

Sharp competition

The contract nearly triples the order book for Ariane 6, which so far stood at 11 shots.

"For the 18 of us, it was the right number, both we wanted something absolutely massive and it is, it is by far the most important contract we have ever signed, and at the same time we obviously wanted to keep our commitments and keep availability for other customers", in addition to the four annual launches intended for European institutions, explained Mr. Israel to AFP in Colorado Springs (Colorado, west) on the sidelines of a congress bringing together the major players in the space sector.

Neither the amount of the contract nor the start of its implementation have been specified by Amazon or Arianespace.

But Mr Israel said he expected "six (shootings) a year over three years".

Each Ariane 6 will carry around 35 Kuiper satellites.

Amazon had already said it was investing "more than 10 billion dollars" in the project, an amount to be compared to the 14.3 billion dollars in net profit that the colossus of online sales earned for the fourth quarter of 2021 alone.

The company wants to "provide low-latency broadband to a wide range of customers, including individual homes, schools, hospitals, businesses, government agencies, rescue teams, mobile operators and others. organizations working in places without a reliable internet connection".

Kuiper will rely, in addition to the cloud computing service Amazon Web Services (AWS), on "Amazon's experience in producing low-cost devices and services, such as Echo and Kindle, in order to provide an affordable and accessible service for customers", promised the Seattle-based firm in the northwestern United States.

Huge as it is, Amazon's high-speed satellite internet project isn't the first.

Billionaire Elon Musk, rival of Mr. Bezos, is in the process of deploying his Starlink network, which claims more than 100,000 subscribers.

The British company OneWeb, taken over after a bankruptcy, has already sent some 428 of the 648 satellites planned for its own service.

© 2022 AFP