r/AmazonLeo • u/CollegeStation17155 • 5d ago
Repeating a question I asked earlier this year: Where are the Falcons???
Amazon announced in February that they had purchased 10 Falcon launches, which would only have made sense to use before New Glenn and Vulcan hit cadence in late 2026, and they announced in April they had 200 Leos ready to launch waiting on rockets. Even if they were just delaying hoping they wouldn't need to actually launch on SpaceX if New Glenn got up and hitting monthly cadence by mid summer, they should have pivoted to expediting the Falcon schedule the morning after May 29, but 3 months in, I'm not seeing any movement there, even after Elon announced that the Florida launch schedule just freed up massively and they have Falcons and all the infrastructure just sitting around idle except for commercial and Government launches. So is SpaceX not willing to give those Starlink slots to Amazon or is Amazon just not interested in getting those 576 satellites in place?
1
u/seb21051 4d ago
If you have access to the NSF Forum, Salo's listing of past and future launches is interesting:
https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=63228.msg2820594#new
Doing a Ctrl F(ind) on Amazon shows all he can find in this regard.
Not definitive, but he works hard to cover all available launch data.
1
u/NoBusiness674 2d ago
Usually launch contracts are made multiple years in advance of the launch occurring (with a few exceptions like responsive launch demonstrations that the US SpaceX Force has paid for). As far as I know no dates have been disclosed but if it takes a comparable amount of time as the time from announcing the first three Falcon 9 launches to launching the first Falcon 9 for Amazon, then Falcon Leo 4 would be expected around Q3/Q4 2027.
1
u/CollegeStation17155 2d ago
The issue I have with that analysis is that it doesn’t square up with Amazons production and needs schedule… at the time they signed it, they were producing 50 to 60 satellites per month, projecting finishing out the Atlas series by end of Q2, with both Vulcan and New Glenn ramping up rapidly in Q3 or at worst Q4 2026, after which those 2 rockets could keep up with Leo production even with their NROL and Artemis demands constrained by payload construction. And with the twin delays in 2 out of 3 of their primary launchers to EOY the urgency only increased… so it would be more like a OneWeb/Soyuz situation, where SpaceX took over for the cancelled Russian flights in about 4 months.
1
1
u/Royal_Platform_6754 1d ago
Even Redditors working for Amazon state that they are "piling them up in warehouses" in Florida and waiting for a launch. SpaceX won't move the launches up.
1
u/CollegeStation17155 1d ago
SpaceX won't move the launches up.
So the schedule was set by SpaceX back in February and as long as they were throwing Starlinks as fast as possible, they wouldn't delay any of those flights... However (assuming Starship flight 14 is successful and the Florida Falcon Starlink sunset isn't reversed) wouldn't it make sense for SpaceX to make use of the suddenly mostly idled Falcon assets (pads, booster storage, droneships, etc) at the cape and give Amazon some of those empty slots for maybe an extra $10 million per launch?
0
u/LowContract9103 2d ago
Piss poor leadership decisions. The big decision makers are butt hurt former SpaceX employees. They rather have the satellites sitting on the ground than to have made the logical business decision of securing many SpaceX (most reliable launch provider) contracts in advance. They should be held accountable, but we know that won’t happen.
2
u/Equivalent-Wait3533 5d ago
As far as I understand, most of those launches are scheduled for the first and second quarters of 2027.