July 16, 2025 SpaceX launched 24 Amazon spacecraft on July 16 atop a Falcon 9 from Cape Canaveral SFS at 2:30 a.m. Credit: SpaceX CAPE CANAVERAL—Hours after launching a batch of satellites for its own Starlink broadband network, SpaceX sent another Falcon 9 rocket into orbit to deliver 24 members of Amazon’s fledgling Kuiper constellation. The launch was the first of three that Amazon purchased from its rival after a pension fund shareholder sued the company for not considering SpaceX when it awarded up to 83 launches to United Launch Alliance (ULA), Arianespace and Blue Origin in April 2022. At the time, those flights were all on rockets that had not yet flown. Amazon previously bought nine rides on ULA’s soon-to-be-retiring Atlas V booster and used one to fly a pair of prototypes in 2023. The campaign to deploy the operational 3,232-member Kuiper network began in April with another Atlas V launch. ULA followed that with a second mission for Amazon in June. The third mission for Project Kuiper fell to SpaceX, which on July 16 launched 24 Amazon spacecraft aboard a Falcon 9. The rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, at 2:30 a.m. EDT and deployed the spacecraft 56 min. later at an altitude of 289 mi. above Earth. Once the satellites complete initial health checks, they will begin to boost their orbits to their operational 391-mi. altitudes. The first Kuiper mission on a Falcon 9, known as KF-01, launched less than 4 1/2 hr. after another Falcon 9 flight from SpaceX’s Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. That rocket added 26 satellites to SpaceX’s nearly 7,900-member Starlink constellation. SpaceX is working toward an initial network of 12,000 satellites to provide global high-speed internet to consumers, governments, businesses and other agencies. With KF-01, the Kuiper constellation grew to 78 satellites.