This is Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer and Tim Steneveek on Bloomberg Radio. When it comes to providing satellite internet from low Earth orbit, pretty much everyone knows about Starlink. It's the SpaceX company that for years has been launching thousands of tiny satellites into space, and that provides connectivity in deserts, war zones, oceans, kind of anywhere that people
can't really get a high speed Internet connection. There's another game in town, though, and it comes from none other than Amazon. Project Kuiper, as it's called, is an enormous undertaking in an arena that has had more bankruptcies than successful businesses. Matt Day is technology reporter for Bloomberg News. He spent months reporting this deep dive in Amazon's a secretive project and got some amazing access. He joins us
from our Seattle bureau this afternoon. First of all, Matt, congratulations on what I know has been the culmination of a huge undertaking. What exactly is Project Kuiper?
So Kiper, like you said, it's never to challenge Starlink, but it's nefer to pride dis An alternative to Internet acts as options for folks who you know, don't have broadband handy. You mentioned cruise ships, airplanes. You know, there's an entire industry already built to serve those those constituencies. Amazon thinks they've built a better mouse trap here that can deliver it better.
From low Earth orbit, better than starlink.
They think, so theo they don't really break out their competitive stats by name another Amazon intrate to not really talk about their competition. They clearly do think that they've got a more powerful set of satellites. You know, Starlink originally was set up with kind of a minimum viable satellite product. Their early iterations were just real, real basic satellites, basic communications satellites. And Amazon, you know, clearly is trying to invest in a more powerful device.
Isn't Amazon a little late to this? After all, starlink has the mind share. Certainly they've done this from war zones. They have the SpaceX rockets to actually get the satellites into orbit. Why does Amazon think that they can maybe build a better mouse trap but actually catch up to what SpaceX has done over the past few years.
Yeah, you're right. They may never catch up to SpaceX when it comes just raw count of satellites but I think what Amazon is banking on here is that there's not going to be a single winner. I mean, you certainly look in the last year for headlines about folks who want to reduce their reliance on Starlink or SpaceX
or just Elon Musk broadly speaking. So I think Amazon, you know, though they haven't put this in the marketing materials, they're likely to get a whole lot of mileage out of the fact that they're just not an Elon Musk company. There's an alternative out there if Amazon does its job in the next couple of years, that'll be available around the globe. Well.
Elon Musk likes to talk about Starlink actually connecting the world, but I'm wondering about Amazon's motivations for Project Kuyper. There have been many, many different huge tech companies, members of the Magnificent Seven in fact, that have tried to connect
the world because their business models depend on it. I mean remember Internet Essentials from Facebook now meta platforms just years ago trying to get the people who were not connected to Internet on the Internet just so they could go to go on Facebook and be advertised to on Facebook. What's Amazon's motivation here.
So it's definitely similar to what ad, Facebook and Google kicking around internet. You know, all of their businesses depend on the Internet, whether it's the retail site and video streaming. But the kind of secret weapon that I think we haven't really figured out how it's going to play into is Amazon Web Services. Amazon is the largest cloud computing company. They handle data and business software for thousands of companies.
Nobody else in the cloud can also deliver you Internet from space, which is what Amazon's going to be able to do in a couple of years. So I think that's a real wild card in terms of this giant business software franchise that they've built up over the last
couple of decades. Is Amazon will be the entire package, not just delivering you kind of online services, but especially for business customers doing disaster recovery, doing connectivity all over the world at mines, cruise ships, or mote sites, that kind of thing.
And these are areas of the world that you know, can't get wireline broadband Internet access to satellite is kind of the next best option, that's.
Right, And that's a good note of caution on this that Amazon is competing not just against Starlink, but against every telco around the world that is investing. You know, it's hundreds of billions a year they pump into their networks. So that's one of the things that felled earlier sets of Internet from space aspirants is that, you know, telcos
are just good at their jobs. Sure there's some pockets where they're not going to connect maybe ever, but you know, they're always refining their networks.
How much of it competitive advantage does SpaceX have given that they actually own the rockets that get these Starlink satellites into orbit, whereas Amazon has to rely on someone else and that's not necessarily Blue Origin.
That's right. Amazon has been really hampered by the fact that there is not a whole lot of non SpaceX rocket launch available. Amazon as the biggest commercial launch deal in history on its books, but their problem is the biggest providers of launch in the United States and in Europe are between rocket vehicles right now, so they're flying
untested stuff. It's going to take a while. Amazon hoped to have some satellites in orbit about a year ago, so they're definitely chasing Starlink, and we saw that they you know, kind of admitted to that fact. Recently and signing a deal with SpaceX for a few launches on their Falcon nine rockets starting in twenty twenty five.
Keep your friends closer and your enemies closer. I guess Hey, let's talk a little bit about Blue Origin, just from the perspective of this being a corollary maybe between SpaceX and Starlink. Could Blue Origin ever serve as a launch vehicle for Project Kuiper?
Oh, they are, They're already on the list. I think Kiper has something like twelve launches on Blue Origins nukelen rocket, which is supposed to be a massive medium or heavy lift vehicle. The problem there is Blue Origin is years behind bringing that to market. You know, we haven't seen the assembled rocket. Blue Origin has never sent anything to
orbit before. So Blue was absolutely one of the launch providers at Amazon's opened to rely on, but they've kind of gotten let down by that other Jeff Bezos company.
Hey, Matt, can you talk a little bit about reporting out this story and the access that you got speaking to people such as Dave Limp, somebody who's been at Amazon for years at this point and has had his hand in many different parts including hardware.
Yeah, you mentioned Dave imp started at Amazon working on kindles. He's an old Apple guy, and then suddenly it was bizarre to find myself talking to him about space topics. He's talking about rocket launches and payload fairings and all this technical stuff. But Amazon's really developed an expertise in that you can go out and check out there as
I did. I guess you can't, but I did check out their R and D facility and suburban Seattle, and they built you know, impressive machining shop and they've got you know, antenna testing going on and all this stuff that you just would not think would be anywhere close to Amazon's you know, core competencies. But if you're willing to spend ten billion dollars in back a satellite venture, I guess you can. You can find your way there.
Does it seem like Amazon has been able to make the hires? I mean this, the type of talent that's that's out there, that is, you know, knowledgeable about this stuff is certainly in high demand right now. And they're competing, you know, not just you know down the street with Boeing, but they're also competing you know, down from down in Hawthorne with SpaceX and then of course with Blue Origin as well.
Oh for sure. In the halls of Kuiper, there's a there's a great mix of it's kind of aerospace veterans. There's a lot of Boeing people around or Boeing adjacent, but there's also a lot of consumer tech vets. There's some SpaceX people. They seem like they've definitely put a team together that kind of crosses I don't know. I
call it the new Space playbook, right. You've got a little bit of hardcore aerospace, a little bit of commercial consumer electronics work to kind of get the manufacturing shops there. So it's a bit of an eclectic group they've they've assembled.
Hey talk to us about Regieve bad y'all and who he is.
As Reegieve runs Amazon's project Kuiper. He's been a tech engineering leader forever. Worked at Hewlett Packard back in the day doing optical mice, doing inkjet printing, found his way to Microsoft, where he worked on Microsoft Zoom the music player, also had some roles on Xbox. He was tapped by Elon Musk to start Starlink back in twenty fourteen, set up the manufacturing line there, got the first couple satellites in orbit, and then in a flash, Elon flies up
to Seattle and the leadership team is gone. And so suddenly Rejieve and a bunch of his pals are looking for work. Amazon had in hand at that point of plan to deliver satellite internet and there's a management team looking for something to do. So, you know, a few years later, he's got sixteen hundred people under him at Amazon and he's having another crack at building a satellite constellation.
Well, Matt, it's just a really fantastic story. We got ten seconds left. Do you think Project hyper can be? Just based on your opinion, you're reporting a viable competitor to SpaceX.
If they figure out manufacturing, they can do it. But that's a really big if.
Manufacturing. I mean Elon Musk is working on manufacturing that cyber truck right now, and doing anything at scale is in this space is just really really tough stuff. Hey, again, a fantastic story. I encourage everybody to go check it out. It's among the most red on the Bloomberg terminal today. It's at Bloomberg dot com as well. Amazon is spending ten billion dollars in challenge in a challenge to Musk's Starlink Mad Day technology reporter for Bloomberg News