Europe’s most powerful rocket roared into action early Thursday morning (April 30).
Amazon Leo, previously known as Project Kuiper, is Amazon’s answer to SpaceX‘s Starlink broadband megaconstellation. It won’t be as big, however; Amazon Leo will eventually consist of about 3,200 satellites, whereas Starlink has more than 10,000 spacecraft (and counting).
Those 3,200 satellites will be lofted over the course of more than 80 launches, sent up by a variety of rockets — the Ariane 6, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and United Launch Alliance’s Atlas V and Vulcan Centaur.
Eleven of those missions have now lifted off to date. Before today, the most recent one occurred on Monday (April 27), when an Atlas V carried 29 Amazon Leo satellites to orbit.
Thursday’s mission, which Arianespace calls VA268, was the seventh-ever flight of the Ariane 6 and the second of its most powerful variant, known as the 64, because it features four strap-on solid rocket boosters.
The first-ever Ariane 64 launch occurred in February, when the rocket delivered 32 Amazon Leo satellites to low Earth orbit. VA268 did the same thing.
“For this mission, the launcher will carry the 32 satellites under its 20-meter-long fairing and deploy them into low Earth orbit following a mission lasting less than 2 hours from liftoff to separation of the last spacecraft,” Arianespace representatives said in a statement last month.
There will be many more of these launches to come — 16, in fact. Amazon booked a total of 18 Ariane 6 flights for the constellation buildout.
<em>Editor’s note: This story was updated at 10 a.m. ET on April 30 with news of successful launch and satellite deployment.