After a sluggish start to 2025, United Launch Alliance announced today that is planning to launch a tranche of Amazon Kuiper satellites on April 9, 2025 from Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The company added that the launch window is set to open at 12:00 PM ET and will last three hours.

This will be ULA’s first launch this year. It recently received USSL certification for its new Vulcan rocket, which is now awaiting payloads prior to its next flight.

What Is Project Kuiper?

Similar to SpaceX’s Starlink, Project Kuiper is Amazon’s initiative to provide global broadband access through a constellation of over 3,000 satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO).

Announced in 2019, the project’s goal is to deliver fast, affordable internet connectivity to unserved and underserved communities worldwide. Like Starlink, by leveraging LEO satellites, Project Kuiper aims to provide low-latency broadband services to a diverse range of customers, including individual households, schools, hospitals, businesses, and government agencies.

To achieve this, Amazon plans to deploy some 3,236 satellites at altitudes ranging from 590 to 630 kilometers. The company has secured agreements for up to 83 launches over a five-year period, utilizing various launch providers such as Arianespace’s Ariane 6, Blue Origin’s New Glenn, and United Launch Alliance’s Atlas V and later, Vulcan Centaur.

“We’ve designed some of the most advanced communications satellites ever built, and every launch is an opportunity to add more capacity and coverage to our network,” said Rajeev Badyal, vice president of Project Kuiper.

“We’ve done extensive testing on the ground to prepare for this first mission, but there are some things you can only learn in flight, and this will be the first time we’ve flown our final satellite design and the first time we’ve deployed so many satellites at once. No matter how the mission unfolds, this is just the start of our journey, and we have all the pieces in place to learn and adapt as we prepare to launch again and again over the coming years.”

27 Kuiper satellites will be aboard Atlas V for the KA-01 mission, which are slated to fly to a 280-mile orbital altitude.

Atlas V

The United Launch Alliance Atlas V has a 5-meter payload fairing, five Northrop Grumman GEM 63 solid rocket boosters, and a single-engine Centaur upper stage.

Standing approximately 62.2 meters tall, the Atlas V 551 can deliver payloads up to 18,814 kilograms to low Earth orbit (LEO) and 8,900 kilograms to geostationary transfer orbit (GTO).

This configuration has been employed in notable missions, including the launches of NASA’s New Horizons probe to Pluto and the Juno spacecraft to Jupiter, and soon, Amazon Kuiper.

Atlas V is also crew-rated, and has carried astronauts to orbit on the Boeing Starliner CFT mission. While Boeing experienced issues with the Starliner spacecraft, its launch and orbital insertion were not one of them. Boeing CFT astronaut Suni Williams told Ars Technica’s Eric Berger recently that “The launch [on Atlas V] was awesome. Both of us looked at each other like, ‘Wow, this is going just perfectly.’ So the ride to space and the orbit insertion burn, all perfect.”