Watch On
Another batch of Amazon’s Project Kuiper broadband satellites will take flight this morning (Sept. 25), and you can watch the action live.
A United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket topped with 27 Project Kuiper craft is scheduled to lift off from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station today, during a 29-minute window that opens at 8:09 a.m. EDT (1209 GMT).
You can watch it live here at Space.com courtesy of ULA, or directly via the company’s YouTube. Coverage will begin about 20 minutes before the window opens.
The Project Kuiper megaconstellation will eventually consist of about 3,200 satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO). These spacecraft will be lofted on more than 80 launches performed by a variety of rockets — SpaceX‘s Falcon 9, Arianespace’s Ariane 6, Blue Origin’s New Glenn and ULA’s Atlas V and Vulcan Centaur.
Today’s launch will be the fifth such mission, following two Atlas V and two Falcon 9 liftoffs that sent a total of 102 Project Kuiper satellites to LEO.
Today’s mission will employ an Atlas V 551, the most powerful variant of the workhorse launcher, which features five side-mounted solid rocket boosters.
If all goes to plan today, the Atlas V’s upper stage will deploy the 27 satellites at an altitude of 280 miles (450 kilometers). After that, “the Project Kuiper team will take over command of the mission from our 24/7 mission operations center in Redmond, Washington, confirm satellite health and ultimately raise the satellites to their assigned orbit of 392 miles (630 km) above Earth,” Amazon representatives wrote in a mission description.