Amazon’s Kuiper satellite project will use laser links

Since launching two prototype satellites for its Kuiper project last October, Amazon has been conducting end-to-end communication network tests. According to the company, an essential system in this project is the Optical Inter-Satellite Links (OISL) system, which until now had been kept under wraps.

During the tests, the KuiperSat-1 and KuiperSat-2 satellite prototypes maintained links of 100 gigabits per second (Gbps) over a distance of almost 1,000 kilometers. With the successful results, Amazon has confirmed that OISLs could be adopted by the first production satellites scheduled for launch in the first half of 2024.

“With the intersatellite optical links in our constellation, the Kuiper project will effectively operate as a mesh network in space,” explains Rajeev Badyal, vice-president of technology for the Kuiper project. “This system was entirely designed in-house to optimize speed, cost and reliability, and the entire architecture worked perfectly from the start. These results were only possible because we approached our OISL architecture as part of a fully integrated project, and this is a testament to the team’s willingness to invent on behalf of customers. We are thrilled to be able to offer these OISL features on all Kuiper satellites from day one,” he adds.

The OISL system uses infrared lasers to send data between satellites as they orbit the planet. Instead of simply transmitting data between a satellite and ground antennas, OISL allows for the direct exchange of data between satellites in a constellation. Amazon will equip each satellite in the Kuiper project with several optical terminals to connect many satellites at the same time, establishing high-speed laser cross-links that form a secure and resilient mesh network in space.

In addition, OISL will increase the speed of data transfer around the world. According to Amazon, Kuiper’s orbital laser network can move data around 30% faster than terrestrial fibre-optic networks. And because the Kuiper project will use AWS services and infrastructure to route data traffic, it will be possible to reduce the latency of Amazon’s network.

These OISL features will be especially beneficial for customers in regions without a nearby ground station, for example cruise ships in the middle of the ocean or an aircraft making a transatlantic flight, giving them the ability to transmit data securely from any location on Earth or in space via laser communication media.

“Amazon’s optical mesh network will provide multiple paths for routing data through space, ensuring resilience and redundancy for customers who need to send information securely,” says Ricky Freeman, vice president of the Kuiper project’s government solutions area. “This is especially important for those who don’t want to use communication architectures that can be intercepted or blocked,” he says.

The first large-scale deployment of Kuiper project satellites should begin in the first half of 2024. Amazon hopes to have enough satellites deployed to start the first customer pilots in the second half of 2024.

The satellites will be produced in a factory in Kirkland, Washington (USA); the goal is to have a constellation of 3,236 satellites in low earth orbit (LEO), half of which must be launched by 2026 to meet the licence requirements of the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

In time: Last September, Elon Musk’s Starlink posted on X (formerly Twitter) about its mesh network in space, with more than 8,000 links between satellites in its constellation also using lasers, with data transfer speeds of up to 100 Gbps on each link. SpaceX  began adding inter-satellite optical links to the Starlink constellation at the beginning of 2021, initially so as not to have to install ground stations at the poles.

Meanwhile…

The start-up Armada is investing in portable datacenters to bring Artificial Intelligence (AI) to the most remote places via SpaceX’s Starlink satellites.

In an interview with Forbes, Dan Wright, CEO of Armada, says that he was annoyed to see terabytes of data in remote areas, such as oil rigs and remote mines, being generated and not exploited to generate benefits. So he spent the last year developing a technological platform to bring powerful computing resources closer to industrial devices and thus exploit the power of AI. A large part of this was built using Starlink satellites.

The solution includes a weather-protected portable datacenter in a box called Galleon to house racks of GPUs, crucial for running AI models. It also comes with the Commander software package with tools for managing and connecting to the Starlink constellation and other Internet connectivity resources in remote areas. Armada also offers its own and third-party application shops for working with locally generated data.

The startup has a Galleon running in its office in Seattle (USA), where it runs AI applications as a demonstration.