Project Kuiper: Inside Amazon’s effort to challenge Elon Musk's starlink internet business

tech.hindustantimes.com:

For a harrowing hour or two after Amazon.com Inc. launched its first satellites, it appeared the company might have lost one of them. The two prototypes had entered orbit over the Atlantic Ocean at 2:24 p.m. Eastern on Oct. 6. An Amazon antenna on the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius made contact with both, but during a subsequent handoff to another station, only one vehicle checked in. Amazon scanned the sky behind the first satellite for a signal from the second one but heard silence. 

The incident threatened to kill the mood for employees who'd gathered to celebrate the launch at Postdoc Brewing, not far from Amazon's Seattle-area space operation. The team had spent years building satellites from scratch and endured months of delays launching them. Now that they were aloft, Amazon needed to make contact to ensure their solar panels had deployed. If not, the batteries would run out and the satellites would fail, a major setback for the retail and cloud-computing giant, already a late entrant in the race to build a profitable business selling internet access from low-Earth orbit.  

Inside Amazon's Mission Operations Center, a conference room stuffed with big video displays, computers and cases of energy drinks, satellite operations chief Yonina DeKeyser and her deputies worked to piece together the scraps of data they'd collected. Between the third and fourth contacts, the guidance, navigation and control team made the call: the missing satellite was fine. The information streaming in could only have come from a pair of healthy spacecraft.  Rajeev Badyal, the project's leader, yelled in triumph.

At the brewery, an Amazonian looking at his phone broke through the din, raising clenched fists as he bellowed “We're power