A multibillion-dollar booking of satellite-launching rockets has suddenly made Amazon one of the busiest space-flight operators on the planet. Will the tech giant’s attempt to corner much of the launch market quash the ambitions of smaller satellite operators, or could this light the fuse on a whole new generation of rocket firms?

On 5 April, Amazon astonished the space industry by revealing that it had for orbital rockets in space-flight history, buying no less than 83 launches over the next five years to place more than 3000 of its Project Kuiper broadband internet satellites into low Earth orbit. The price paid hasn’t been disclosed, but is thought to be around $10 billion.

Like SpaceX�����Ի� OneWeb, Amazon is hoping to provide global internet connectivity to areas of the world underserved by traditional wired telecommunications firms. But Amazon is currently way behind on the competitive curve. “Kuiper is playing catch-up to [SpaceX’s] Starlink and OneWeb, which are already mid-way deployed,” says Greg Sadlier, a London-based analyst at space-flight consultancy .

But the sheer size of the rocket orders Amazon has placed – with United Launch Alliance, Arianespace and Blue Origin – is raising questions over just how much launch capacity will remain for other would-be satellite operators. Sanctions following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have seen Soyuz rockets ruled out as a satellite launch option for Western firms – even OneWeb, formerly launching on Soyuz, is now being flown by SpaceX – so for those not booked on SpaceX Falcon 9 flights, what are the options?

“If Amazon has kind of absorbed most of the launch capability, what’s left for everybody else? Where do other operators go to launch their systems?” says , a space scientist at the University of Southampton in the UK.

This could be of particular concern for operators wanting to replace remote sensing and Earth observation satellites when they reach the end of their lives, he says, with the scale of Amazon’s order reducing launch availability for others.

One option could be to purchase a ride on rockets launched by the Japanese or Indian space agencies, but this generally only works if customers are happy for their satellites to be placed in the same orbit as the primary payload, which is usually dictated by the government. China also has its own rockets, but generally solely offers ride-shares to domestic firms.

All is not lost, however: a raft of companies are now developing a new generation of rockets designed to launch smallsats – those in the sub-1500-kilogram range. The , which tracks smallsat launchers, lists more than 180 potential vehicles, though more than 80 per cent are still in the development or concept stages.

Companies entering the smallsat rocket fray include start-ups Astra and ABL Space Systems in the US, and Orbex and Skyrora in the UK. Amazon is already involved in this arena as well: it is set to launch of its Project Kuiper internet satellites on an ABL Space Systems RS1 rocket later this year.

So through its massive rocket order, Amazon may have done the smallsat rocket-makers a favour by forcing other operators to seek a ride elsewhere. It is now up to these emerging businesses to come up with the goods. “They will need to rise to the supply challenge to meet that demand,” says Sadlier.

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Liftoff: Elon Musk and the desperate early days that launched SpaceX

Eric Berger

William Collins (Buy from *)

IN THE autumn of 2008, a Falcon 1 rocket built by a maverick start-up called SpaceX lifted off from Kwajalein Atoll in the North Pacific Ocean and made it all the way to Earth orbit. After three earlier attempts had failed, it meant Elon Musk‘s 6-year-old firm suddenly moved from being a mere wannabe to a space-flight player to be reckoned with.

But it had been a close run thing. In Lift Off, Eric Berger’s compelling history of SpaceX’s early days, we discover what few knew at the time: if that fourth flight of the Falcon 1 had also failed, the company could easily have gone bust.

It was vital that the rocket reached orbit because it was powered by SpaceX’s home-grown, ultra-efficient kerosene/oxygen Merlin rocket motor. Nine of these would be needed for the much larger rocket that cash-rich clients like NASA wanted to use to send cargo to the International Space Station (ISS) – and, later, crewed missions. If Falcon 1 hadn’t shown that the motor could power a rocket to orbit, there might not have been a Falcon 9, the rocket that has become the backbone of SpaceX’s business.

Berger chronicles the amazing human and technological struggles that led to the success of the launch. To be convincing, he needed unprecedented access to Musk and, perhaps more crucially, to the key propulsion, avionics, structural and launch engineers behind Falcon 1.

After tracking them all down, Berger captured their entertaining warts-and-all stories of potentially avoidable foul-ups, the details of which make this book an essential, unofficial reference text for what to do (and not do) as space flight goes commercial.

What drives SpaceX, Berger writes, is Musk’s relentless quest to get humans to Mars as soon as possible. That means two things: a laser-like focus on hiring the smartest engineers, and adopting ultra-fast engineering techniques.

Musk comes across as a fiercely demanding boss, and the lengths he goes to hand-pick talent are revealing. On one occasion, he called Google co-founder Larry Page to ask if a senior Google staffer could work from a Los Angeles office instead of a Silicon Valley one so that the staffer’s spouse could work for SpaceX. Page agreed. When an academic found that five of his 10 students had gone to work at SpaceX, Musk is said to have got in touch – not to explain, but to find out where the other five went.

Engineering rockets faster, however, means eschewing traditional aerospace processes in which design engineers can spend careers “creating stacks of paperwork without ever touching hardware”, says Berger. Musk’s approach involves testing systems early, designing out flaws so each version becomes more reliable.

“At the time of writing, three prototypes of the firm’s Starship Mars rocket have exploded spectacularly”

It also means not being afraid to fail – and fail SpaceX has. From running out of liquid oxygen on the launchpad – which boiled off, as it took too long to fix software-related shutdown bugs on the launchpad – to fuel lines leaking due to salt corrosion in the tropical air of Kwajalein, the company has experienced a litany of errors.

But SpaceX has gone on to shake up the industry by cutting the cost of launching satellites threefold, developing a staggering ability to land rocket stages that its competitors still ditch, as well as flying astronauts to the ISS from US soil on its Crew Dragon for the first time since the space shuttle retired.

The firm’s army of online fans seems to be getting used to its “go fast, break things and fix them” process. Attempts to land Falcon 9 rocket stages failed many times before success dawned. At the time of writing, three prototypes of the firm’s Starship moon and Mars rocket have exploded spectacularly. All of which makes it a particularly good time to publish Liftoff, the fascinating backstory of why SpaceX does it this way.

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