Amazon Kuiper second satellite launch postponed by ULA due to rocket booster issue

United Launch Alliance connected Monday was forced to hold the 2nd formation carrying a batch of Amazon's Project Kuiper net satellites due to the fact that of a occupation with the rocket booster.

With astir 30 minutes near successful the countdown, ULA announced it was scrubbing the motorboat owed to an contented with "an elevated purge temperature" wrong its Atlas V rocket's booster engine. The institution said it volition supply a caller motorboat day astatine a aboriginal point.

"Possible contented with a GN2 purge enactment that cannot beryllium resolved wrong the count," ULA CEO Tory Bruno said successful a station connected Bluesky. "We volition request to basal down for today. We'll benignant it and beryllium back."

The motorboat from Florida's Space Coast had been acceptable for past Friday, but was rescheduled to Monday astatine 1:25 p.m. ET owed to inclement weather.

Amazon in April successfully sent up 27 Kuiper net satellites into debased Earth orbit, a portion of abstraction that's wrong 1,200 miles of the Earth's surface. The 2nd voyage volition nonstop "another 27 satellites into orbit, bringing our full constellation size to 54 satellites," Amazon said successful a blog post.

Kuiper is the latest entrant successful the burgeoning outer net industry, which aims to beam high-speed net to the crushed from orbit. The manufacture is presently dominated by Elon Musk's Space X, which operates Starlink. Other competitors see SoftBank-backed OneWeb and Viasat.

Amazon is targeting a constellation of much than 3,000 satellites. The institution has to conscionable a Federal Communications Commission deadline to motorboat fractional of its full constellation, oregon 1,618 satellites, by July 2026.

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