Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin on Wednesday announced plans to deploy 5,408 satellites in space for a communications network that will serve data centers, governments and businesses, and enter the satellite constellation market dominated by Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
Blue Origin said deployment of the satellites is planned to begin in the last quarter of 2027, with the network being designed for “data speeds of up to 6 Tbps anywhere on Earth.” The speeds that are possible with planned optical communications from satellites are extreme by consumer standards and will make the network vital for data processing and large-scale government programs. Blue Origin said the network will aim to serve a maximum of about 100,000 customers.
The TerraWave reveal coincides with a race in the space industry to build data centers in space that can meet the growing demand for large-scale AI data processing, which requires enormous energy and resources on Earth, as adoption of the technology expands.
The planned network includes another satellite constellation linked to Bezos, Amazon’s executive chairman, who is in the early stages of deploying LEO — a network previously called Project Kuiper — consisting of 3,200 satellites providing internet to consumers and businesses.
Musk’s Starlink network of about 10,000 satellites is at the forefront of a global effort to establish Internet infrastructure in space, where swarms of low-orbit satellites provide greater security and higher connection speeds than traditional, unitary satellites in space.
The SpaceX CEO has said he plans to build data centers in space to complement the Starlink network, while Bezos has predicted that such space-based centers will become common in orbit within the next 10 to 20 years.
Starlink, which has a reported more than 6 million customers in at least 140 countries, targets individual consumers, businesses, governments and, with its StarShield version, US national security agencies. With 180 satellites in space so far, Amazon LEO has a similar customer strategy.
A handful of Chinese companies are rapidly deploying similar satellite networks to keep pace with Starlink, which has proven vital to remote communications and geopolitical conflicts. China is developing new reusable rockets that could launch thousands of satellites at low cost over the next several years, a playbook first written by Musk’s SpaceX and its reusable Falcon 9 rocket.
Blue Origin’s reusable New Glenn rocket, which has launched twice but has been slow to achieve rapid flight rates, will likely be a key part of TerraWave deployments.
According to Blue Origin’s statement, unlike Starlink, the planned network appears to be off-limits to individual consumers.
Blue Origin’s statement said: “TerraWave enterprise-grade user and gateway terminals can be rapidly deployed around the world and interfaced with existing high-capacity infrastructure, providing additional route diversity and strengthening overall network resiliency,” though it is not clear what types of existing infrastructure the network can work with.
