FCC grants Amazon conditional relief on satellite deployment deadline

Amazon was granted a conditional waiver from the Federal Communications Commission, waiving the requirement to have half of its Leo satellite constellation in orbit by July 30 after declining a February request by the company to have the deadline extended by two years, and offering a limited waiver instead in June.

In the same week, an Amazon Leo VP announced that the constellation will enter commercial service later this year, having previously pledged to enter service mid-2026.

“We’ve completed enough launches for initial service this [year], and future missions ⁠just add coverage and capacity,” Chris Weber, VP of business and product for Amazon Leo posted on social media platform X. “Still lots ​of work ahead – including raising all these new satellites to their assigned altitude.”

Amazon in April bought satellite giant Globalstar for $11.57 billion, an operator that had previously agreed to allocate 85% of its network to Apple in support of iPhone and Apple Watch connectivity via satellite, cementing an aggressive trajectory into the market.

Failure to launch
Amazon last week completed its 14th launch, orbiting 29 satellites aboard a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket, upping its fleet count to 394.

Amazon was required to orbit half of its planned 3,232-satellite constellation as a condition of the company’s license to operate, which was granted in 2020 when the business was still called Project Kuiper.

The FCC has set a condition for its waiver, which includes that its spectrum priority status established for Amazon Leo in its 2020 and 2021 processing rounds would not be granted to any of the company’s satellites launched after July 30. This spectrum priority for the entire constellation would be restored once the company gets around to orbiting half its planned constellation or by March 2028 should it fail to hit that launch mark.

Another waiver clause states that spectrum priority could also be restored in October 2027 if Amazon can demonstrate it has finished building all the satellites for its fleet and established launch contracts to reach the 1,616-satellite milestone, even if those launches are to commence after that date.

Amazon Leo had previously promised the FCC it could orbit at least 700 satellites by July 30, a tall ask in light of its current count.

Monopoly to duopoly?
The FCC states the menuvers are in service of promoting competition in the low-Earth orbit (LEO) broadband market, disrupting the growing Starlink hegemony. However, this might have been achieved by simply revoking Amazon’s spectrum priority, granting third-party providers a more even playing field between the two billionaire-backed LEO giants, while demonstrating to market players that regulative support cannot be relied upon after breaking agreements.

SpaceX themselves were inclined to agree, arguing that the regulator should have at least withheld decisions over the spectrum priority of undeployed satellites for a later licensing cycle. Prevailing wisdom across the satellite industry has been that Amazon Leo would exercise predatory pricing in order to absorb market share and compete meaningfully with Starlink.

The future of Amazon Leo
Amazon hopes for better success in the latter half of 2026, citing its ambitions to use ULA’s heavy-lift Vulcan rocket for which the company has become an early anchor customer with 40 discreet missions already booked. The company’s first launch with the rocket has been slated to take place from Cape Canaveral, Florida, starting in September.

“With hundreds of flight-ready satellites standing by at the Cape and a new, dedicated vertical integration facility ready to support Leo Vulcan 1 and subsequent missions, we have a clear path to increase launch and deployment cadence, helping us quickly expand network coverage following an initial service rollout later this year,” Melissa Wuerl, Leo’s director of launch systems, said in a statement.

Amazon Leo has previously blamed the space launch bottleneck for its state of affairs, the latter being a problem discussed far more widely outside America than within. Setbacks in recent years have delayed the rollout of ULA’s Vulcan Centaur, Arianespace’s Ariane 6 that has only launched 100 Amazon Leo satellites beginning in February, and Blue Origin’s New Glenn.

If the company had set aside billionaire rivalries and held its nose to aggressively buy SpaceX Falcon 9 launch capacity early on, the company may have met its deadline, but assumptions about the reliability of New Glenn, as well as belief in the health of the wider launch market has been a miscalculation that these deliberations at the FCC has shone an embarrassing spotlight upon.

Even as experimental rockets go, New Glenn has had a disastrous history in pursuit of the “move fast and break things” mantra mythologised by SpaceX, seeing NASA’s confidence in the spacecraft for its Lunar ambitions wither time and again. The explosion of the rocket’s first stage on May 28 was believed to be the most powerful since 1969, when the Soviet N-1 super-heavy rocket blew up, sending debris sailing tens-of-miles from the launch pad. SDX Central