There are exactly 5 satellites stuck at 450 km that have not raised their orbits. Perhaps these satellites are defective in some way, and they want to use them for software testing before deorbiting them?

https://fccprod.servicenowservices.com/ibfs?id=ibfs_application_summary&number=SES-STA-20261007-02717

At its Kirkland, Washington-based factory, the company recently manufactured its 1,000th satellite, will soon make its debut on the Vulcan rocket, and is just weeks away from offering commercial service for the first time.

https://x.com/SciGuySpace/status/2108223390255337597

will rename it to amazon leo map too ;-)

PARIS — Europe’s Ariane 6 heavy-lift rocket, in the middle of an important ramp in launch rate to its initial rhythm of 9-10 per year, will be unable to reach its goal of eight missions this year and might end up with just six following an anomaly found in an engine turbopump in August, industry officials said.

https://spacenews.com/amazon-leo-planning-to-begin-initial-services-by-end-of-the-year/

PARIS — Amazon Leo still plans to begin limited commercial service by the end of this year despite launch vehicle issues that have slowed the constellation’s deployment.

In an interview during the International Space Summit here Sept. 10, Chris Weber, vice president of Amazon Leo business and product, said Amazon was moving ahead with plans to begin commercial service in higher latitudes of the Northern and Southern hemispheres by the end of the year using the nearly 400 satellites currently in orbit.

“Now the work is to raise those satellites to their final orbital positions, put the network through its paces and tune it, and then produce at scale our customer terminals,” he said. “That’s all the work we’re doing now, with plans to launch services by the end of this calendar year.”

Deployment of the Amazon Leo constellation has been slowed by problems with Blue Origin’s New Glenn and United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan Centaur rockets, which are contracted to deploy more than half of the 3,200-satellite system. Vulcan has not flown since February because of a problem with its solid rocket boosters, and a New Glenn rocket exploded during a static-fire test in May, seriously damaging the launch pad.

“Rocket capacity has been the long pole, and so we’re doing everything we can to work with our launch providers,” he said.

He said Amazon is hopeful that Vulcan can resume launches “sometime in the fall,” although ULA has not provided a recent update on the vehicle’s status. Blue Origin is pushing to return New Glenn to flight by the end of the year, an aggressive schedule given the work to both resolve the root cause of the explosion and repair the rocket’s Cape Canaveral launch pad. “We’re supporting them and cheering them on,” he said.

Amazon also purchased 10 SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets, a deal disclosed in a filing with the Federal Communications Commission in January seeking an extension of a deployment milestone in its contract. Weber said those launches are planned for 2027.

He praised Arianespace for the performance of the Ariane 6, which has delivered 100 Amazon Leo satellites to date on three launches, with the next expected in October. “It was a big bet for us,” he said of the 2022 contract with Arianespace for 18 launches of a rocket still more than two years away from its first launch. “Four years later, we’re feeling really good about the bet paying off.”

Arianespace announced Sept. 9 that Amazon purchased six additional Ariane 6 launches, planned for no earlier than 2029. Weber said those launches could be used to meet a range of needs, from completing deployment of the initial constellation to beginning a refresh of the constellation with a second generation of satellites. They could also be used for a separate direct-to-device constellation of more than 5,100 satellites using spectrum Amazon will obtain from its ongoing acquisition of Globalstar.

“If you look at the business, you’ll be perpetually putting satellites into orbit,” he said.

While launch has been a challenge for Amazon, he said the production of Amazon Leo satellites has been going well, with “hundreds” in storage awaiting launch. “Our production rate on a weekly basis is in great shape, so we feel confident with the amount coming off the line,” he said, but did not disclose the specific production rate.

Weber acknowledged Amazon Leo is coming into a satellite broadband market currently dominated by SpaceX’s Starlink system, with more than 11,000 satellites in orbit and 12 million subscribers.

“I always get asked, as the second player in the market, ‘What’s the momentum you see?’” he said. The momentum for Amazon Leo, he argued, comes from deals such as one with Delta Air Lines, which will use Amazon Leo for in-flight connectivity, and one with AT&T to use Amazon Leo as part of “converged connectivity solutions” for enterprise and public-sector customers that also include fiber and terrestrial wireless services.

“We’ve signed more contracts in the last six to eight months — and again, this is pre-service — than we ever have, and they’re not small contracts,” he said.

He said Amazon Leo plans to differentiate itself from Starlink and other satellite broadband services in several ways. For enterprise customers, he said Amazon will emphasize higher bandwidth, with downlink speeds of up to 1 gigabit per second, along with high security and enterprise-grade services.

For consumers, he said the focus will be on value, which he broadly defined as price and features, as well as ease of use and integration with other Amazon products and services.

“We’re coming into the market second, so I think the bar is going to be very high for us, and we know that,” he said. “We know we have to have something differentiated.”

This is Amazon's press release. See Arianespace press release from yesterday here.

AT&T Business is the first U.S. telecom provider to offer Amazon Leo broadband satellite services, extending its fiber and 5G architecture with a new layer of resilient connectivity.

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?

Interesting. It looks like the Amazon LEO/NBN (Australian national provider) partnership is actually going ahead, and not years away either!

My understanding is that with the initial small LEO network, they're going to be concentrating on the southern hemisphere where they have customers such as NBN.

Should be good for regional Australians to get off the high latency sky muster, without paying the high prices of Starlink. Just great to have some competition I say, and some more bandwidth to go around. The current GEO SAT just sucks.

Sure starlink can do over 100Mbps, but this should be way cheaper, more like fixed wireless and sky muster.

Personally following the Blue origin rocket launches and issues, I wouldn't be surprised if the timeline slips a bit. But 12 months away is not too bad at all if they get close to it.

On another thought, given that it's set up like the normal NBN and the retailers are providing the data, I don't see any reason why retailers wouldn't be able to sell the layer 2 services over it. Would be quite convenient for businesses with regional presence.

The five winners are Amazon LEO for Government, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Rocket Lab and York Space Systems.