Amazon’s $10 Billion Satellite Venture Enters Factory Mode

Amazon’s long road to space

Amazon’s first two prototype satellites will soon slam into the Earth’s atmosphere, finishing their lifespans in a retirement-by-fire plan. Next up, Amazon has to build and launch new satellites — thousands of them.

The Seattle retail and cloud-computing giant is spending upwards of $10 billion to develop what it hopes will be a lucrative business selling connectivity from orbit. It’s an enterprise that shares the same basic business plan — and many of the same founding executives — as SpaceX’s Starlink: put thousands of satellites in space to sell beamed-down internet coverage all over the world.