Amazon says it’s been harder than expected to secure rides for its Amazon Leo broadband internet satellites, and now it’s asking the Federal Communications Commission for more time.
The request for an extension, filed today, asks the FCC to give Amazon until July 30, 2028, to deploy half of its 3,232 satellites in low Earth orbit. The current deadline is July 30, 2026.
Amazon said it’s spent more than $10 billion on its Leo constellation and has reserved more than 100 launches to get the satellites in their proper orbits. But it acknowledged that it’ll miss the original deadline, which was set in 2020 when the FCC gave the initial go-ahead for what was then known as Project Kuiper.
“Despite a historic reserve of launch capacity and deep investments in launch infrastructure, Amazon Leo has faced a shortage in the near-term availability of launches,” the company said. “This shortage has been driven by manufacturing disruptions, the failure and grounding of new launch vehicles, and limitations in spaceport capacity.”
Citing the launch availability gap, Amazon said it has had to reduce the production rate at its satellite manufacturing facility in Kirkland, Wash. “Amazon Leo is capable of consistently manufacturing 30 satellites per week — or over 1,500 satellites per year,” the company said. “To date, Amazon Leo has produced hundreds of flight-qualified satellites, and could readily have produced a multiple of this amount but for adjustments to its production schedule made in response to the delays in its launch manifest.”
The rocket shortage wasn’t the only factor behind the schedule delay. In the filing, Amazon said a prototype satellite test mission that was launched in 2023 “validated Amazon Leo’s general design but resulted in unexpected re-engineering to improve performance and reliability — a critical effort that delayed full-scale manufacturing by approximately nine months.”
Amazon has had 180 production-grade satellites launched so far, on four United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rockets and three SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets. The first heavy-lift launches on ULA’s Vulcan and the European-built Ariane 6 rocket are supposed to be coming up in the next few months. Amazon has signed up for two dozen launches on Blue Origin’s heavy-lift New Glenn rocket. And in today’s filing, Amazon acknowledged that it’s reserved 10 Falcon 9 rockets in addition to the three already launched.
By the end of July, Amazon expects to have 700 satellites in orbit. “By this date, Amazon Leo also expects to have its customer terminals in the hands of more enterprise and government customers, and to be poised to roll out service more broadly in the U.S. and across the globe,” Amazon said.
Amazon insisted that it will make a final FCC deadline to have all of its planned 3,232 satellites deployed by mid-2029. In the filing, the company suggested that the agency could just go ahead and waive the halfway-point deadline as an alternative to granting an extension.
Although the request for a deadline extension was widely expected, it’s coming at a time when the market for satellite internet service is heating up. SpaceX’s Starlink network currently dominates that market, with more than 9,000 satellites launched and more than 9 million subscribers served. And last week, Blue Origin announced that it was working on an ultra-high-speed satellite data network called TeraWave.
In a series of posts to the X social-media platform, industry consultant Tim Farrar said the timing of the request “seems like more than a coincidence after the Blue Origin TeraWave announcement led to speculation about a spinoff of Amazon Leo to BO [Blue Origin].”
“It doesn’t seem particularly wise for Amazon to plan on launching 3,200 of the current design, rather than moving to a more advanced model that will be more competitive with Starlink V3. However, it will at least quiet any questions about Amazon Leo’s future for now,” Farrar wrote. “That’s really important when Amazon Leo are trying hard to win customer commitments in the coming months, especially after recent layoffs at the company.”
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