AMZN Amazon.com Inc

By Maria Armental

Amazon.com Inc.'s plans to create a network of more than 3,000 satellites to deliver high-speed internet got the green light from U.S. regulators, pitting it against with Elon Musk's Space Exploration Technologies Corp.

Kuiper Systems LLC's application, which got unanimous conditional approval from the Federal Communications Commission over competitors' concerns, calls for the satellites to be deployed in five phases, with service beginning once the first 578 satellites are launched.

The approval, among other things, is conditioned on Kuiper's final orbital debris mitigation plan.

One of the issues raised by SpaceX was that Kuiper hadn't submitted a casualty risk analysis, including an estimate regarding whether portions of a satellite would survive re-entry and reach Earth's surface and the probability of human casualty.

No timeline for deployment was given. The satellites would operate as low as about 367 miles from Earth.

In addition to providing ground station service directly to customers, Amazon said in a statement its Project Kuiper will provide backhaul solutions for wireless carriers extending LTE and next-generation 5G service to new regions.

"There are still too many places where broadband access is unreliable or where it doesn't exist at all," Dave Limp, Amazon's senior vice president for devices and services, wrote in a blog post.

Project Kuiper, a roughly $10 billion investment, will change that, Mr. Limp said. "We're off to the races," he said.

When Amazon disclosed the project last year, Mr. Musk turned to Twitter to call Amazon Chief Executive Jeff Bezos a copycat.

SpaceX's Starlink project, which is expected to power the company's bottom line, initially secured FCC approval to operate about 4,400 satellites at about 715 miles up, last year got approval to operate about 1,500 of those satellites at about 342 miles.

Starlink targets service in Northern U.S. and Canada this year.

SpaceX couldn't immediately be reached for comment Friday.

Write to Maria Armental at maria.armental@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

July 31, 2020 13:45 ET (17:45 GMT)

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