Unless they subsidize, New Glenn will have to be quite expensive. As the announcement says, they spent 3.5 billion just on a factory and a launchpad, and they are years away from launching.
Amazon, as such a high visibility public company, may have a hard time justifying a 2X+ price difference versus launching on Falcons, and for Starship the difference could be significantly more.
It's also questionable if Amazon is willing to wait 3 years to get any significant amount of sats into orbit. That will give Starlink a big advantage.
Of course SpaceX also has an incentive to delay Kuiper, so they might not bid for it at all, or only provide very limited availability.
I guess the optimistic take is that Bezos believes the addressable launch market will be huge enough to amortize multi-billion upfront costs. It's definitely a hail mary.
Unless they subsidize, New Glenn will have to be quite expensive. As the announcement says, they spent 3.5 billion just on a factory and a launchpad, and they are years away from launching.
Amazon, as such a high visibility public company, may have a hard time justifying a 2X+ price difference versus launching on Falcons, and for Starship the difference could be significantly more.
It's also questionable if Amazon is willing to wait 3 years to get any significant amount of sats into orbit. That will give Starlink a big advantage.
Of course SpaceX also has an incentive to delay Kuiper, so they might not bid for it at all, or only provide very limited availability.