While Jeff Bezos has a rocket company it is pretty interesting to see that his company, Blue Origin, will not be launching the satellites for Amazon's Project Kulper internet service constellation. Amazon is arriving late to the party was both SpaceX and OneWeb have launch hundreds of satellites alone. What Amazon has that really helps boost it though is an immense war chest in the battle of internet satellites. OneWeb has just come out of bankrupt at the beginning of this year. Creating a reliable internet service from scratch for the whole wide world is an extremely expensive endeavor.
Amazon has just announced that they will start by using United Launch Alliances Atlas V rockets. With this announcement came the caveat that Amazon was already expecting to need multiple launch vehicles and providers. This means that another company like SpaceX could easily fill the needs of Amazon comes into play. It would be interesting to see though if SpaceX would do this as they would be helping the direct competition. Blue Origin could still end up capturing some of the launches and I would bet that they would end up doing so as Bezos could keep more of the process in-house so to speak.
The other huge news that has come out of the day is America once more being on the cutting edge in space. Earlier this year the Preservarence Rover touched down on the Red Planet. Within this rover was a 19" helicopter, Ingenuity, whose main purpose was to be the first vehicle to fly on another planet. After a minor mishap early this morning, the little guy successfully took off! Reaching about 3 meters in height or roughly 9 feet Ingenuity's first flight was a little over 39 seconds long!
An extremely important thing was on that helicopter though that NASA did not initially release until the rover and helicopter successfully made it to Mars. Ingenuity had a small swath of fabric from the Wright Brothers Flyer 1 wings. Flyer 1 was the plane that took off at Kitty Hawk 117 years ago. This was a really really cool thing that NASA did to honor the Wright Brothers and was something that they did not have to do! This first flight is going to lead to even more and the data that could be collected by really gathering data in two places at once is! The applications of this moving forward are almost unimaginable due to the sheer amount of possibilities!
