Jeff Bezos’ $20 Billion Challenge to SpaceX Starts With Donald Trump

(Bloomberg) — Jeff Bezos, a target of Donald Trump’s jabs during his first term, is expected to meet the President-elect next week. The Amazon.com Inc. founder will need the new administration’s help in the space race against fellow centibillionaire Elon Musk.

If all had gone according to plan, Project Kuiper, Amazon’s challenger to Musk’s dominant Starlink satellite internet service, would be serving beta customers by now.

Instead, Kuiper has fallen behind schedule and Amazon is facing the prospect of an incoming White House administration stacked with people aligned with SpaceX, the Musk company that’s his fiercest space competitor.

Kuiper’s first launches of operational satellites have been twice postponed in 2024, most recently by rocket maker United Launch Alliance, which said it needed to prioritize a pair of US Space Force missions before year-end.

The schedule is uncertain: ULA, a joint venture of Boeing Co. and Lockheed Martin Corp., won’t complete those Space Force launches this year as it investigates an incident during an October mission, a ULA spokesperson confirmed to Bloomberg.

Meanwhile, Kuiper’s costs are soaring to as much as $20 billion, compared to the minimum of $10 billion Amazon initially pledged, according to a report from Quilty Space that said the Seattle-based giant will need “a miracle” to meet a government deadline to have more than 1,600 satellites operating by mid-2026.

The company will therefore likely need to seek a waiver from the Federal Communications Commission.

During Trump’s first term, the president lashed out over coverage of his administration by the Bezos-owned Washington Post, and Amazon fought back with a lawsuit alleging Trump instructed the Pentagon to “screw Amazon” by locking it out of a bid.

Bezos has been taking a conciliatory approach recently.

Following Trump’s victory, Bezos made a rare post on X to congratulating the president-elect. Bezos took to the platform again to quickly shoot down Musk’s claim that the Amazon founder had predicted Trump would lose.

Amazon is donating $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund, a company spokesperson said Thursday, joining Meta Platforms Inc. in contributing to the festivities as tech companies look to build positive relationships with the administration.

During an appearance at the New York Times DealBook Summit on Dec. 4, Bezos said he was “very optimistic” about Trump’s return to the White House. “What I’ve seen so far is that he is calmer than he was the first time and more confident, more settled,” he said.

Unlike SpaceX, Amazon has no rockets of its own to launch satellites.

The first mission will be on ULA’s Atlas V, a rocket in service for many years, as part of a deal for nine Atlas launches announced in 2021. A year later, Amazon said it would use new rockets from ULA, European provider Arianespace and Bezos-funded startup Blue Origin LLC for as many as 83 missions.

Blue Origin’s long-delayed New Glenn could have its inaugural launch before year end, though Europe’s Ariane 6 and ULA’s Vulcan have flown a combined three times. Amazon last December announced a contract with SpaceX, but for just three launches.

“Kuiper is overly reliant on three brand-new launch vehicles,” said Caleb Henry, director of research at Quilty Space. “For Amazon to get into service as fast as possible, it needs all of its launch providers to scale up to a pace of regular launches at a rate that’s faster than industry precedent.”

With the two Space Force missions delayed until next year, ULA hasn’t said when it will launch Amazon’s satellites. The Space Force’s flights take priority because of national security, but that doesn’t always mean such launches need to go before those of other customers, ULA said.

Amazon aims to launch the satellites early in the new year and begin service by the end of 2025, according to a company spokesperson. Amazon said it expects to ramp up production and deployment after the first mission and get on track for servicing customers in 2025.

Kuiper has potential to be competitive once Amazon gets the service started, according to S&P Global Ratings analyst Chris Mooney.

“You have a deep-pocketed owner, you have a culture of going direct to the customer,” he said. “Starlink alone is not capable of serving that entire market. There’s room for Amazon and Kuiper to come in.”

However, the compressed launch schedule gives Amazon little time to meet an FCC deadline for half of Kuiper’s fleet of more than 3,230 satellites to be operating by July 2026. By then, the five-member commission, which has the power to extend that timeline or otherwise modify Kuiper’s clearance to operate, is likely to have a Republican majority.

Getting an FCC waiver ordinarily wouldn’t be difficult, said Bloomberg Intelligence senior analyst John Davies. “Historically, regulators have been pretty relaxed about this when there aren’t any extraneous factors,” he said.

–With assistance from Matt Day, Kelcee Griffis and Loren Grush.