2025 Week 19 | SpaceX's Concern Should be Amazon.com, not Blue Origin

I. Tracking

1. The Jeff Bezo Billionaire Empire Is Quietly Coming to Take Elon Musk’s US Government Dollars

Amazon’s Project Kuiper has partnered with L3Harris Technologies to develop advanced satellite payloads tailored for military and public safety communications. By leveraging Amazon Web Services (AWS), the collaboration aims to enhance data processing, encryption, and operational resilience in tactical environments.

Amazon’s long-term vision is clear: to position itself as a full-spectrum provider for government communications and networking. This positioning becomes especially compelling once Kuiper’s low Earth orbit satellite constellation is operational. Unlike SpaceX’s Starshield—an offshoot of its commercially focused Starlink—Amazon is building Kuiper with direct integration into AWS from the ground up. This tight coupling of cloud infrastructure and space-based connectivity will allow for faster, more secure, and more adaptable communications solutions, especially in environments where resilience and real-time data access are mission-critical.

For government acquisition programs, such seamless interoperability is increasingly non-negotiable, especially in the defense world. Current legacy systems often require separate contracts just to ensure compatibility between satellites, ground stations, and software environments. The Amazon-L3Harris partnership sidesteps this complexity by offering an end-to-end solution, reducing procurement friction and ensuring consistent standards across the architecture, while also accelerating modernization efforts.

Beyond defense, this unified approach could appeal to civilian agencies and state governments seeking cost savings and operational efficiency. Amazon’s ability to bundle connectivity (through satellites), data processing, storage, and analytics under one umbrella makes it a compelling alternative to managing multiple vendors. For example, replacing a traditional ISP and a separate cloud provider with a single, scalable package. On paper, the idea is great.

What truly will differentiate Amazon, however, is its presence in the elite cloud provider club. While Starshield benefits from SpaceX’s hardware leadership, it lacks a mature, enterprise-grade cloud platform and all the bells and whistles that go with it. In the ongoing "cloud wars," only a few major players remain: Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, and arguably IBM. Of those, Amazon is in the lead to provide a connection option that is space-based, and notably, Elon Musk does not yet own a company that is a direct player in that top-tier cloud arena.

Amazon, in contrast, can embed Kuiper within one of the world’s top cloud-providers. That’s a significant edge in a landscape where secure data mobility and real-time analytics are just as important as bandwidth.

That said, Amazon’s track record in securing major U.S. government tech contracts has been mixed. While AWS remains a dominant cloud provider for parts of the federal government—supporting agencies like the CIA and portions of the Department of Defense—it also notably lost the high-profile JEDI contract to Microsoft in 2019 after a prolonged bidding controversy. And although it later secured a share of the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) contract alongside Microsoft, Google, and Oracle, it no longer holds a uniquely dominant position in the federal cloud space.

It's also important to recognize the politics of it all, especially with the current executive branch. Once a vocal critic of Donald Trump, especially through his ownership of The Washington Post, Jeff Bezos has since taken a more pragmatic approach. With major Amazon and Blue Origin contracts on the line, public gestures like attending Trump’s inauguration alongside Elon Musk suggest a strategic pivot. Preserving key government partnerships could be essential to maintaining and growing Amazon’s foothold in defense and aerospace markets.

Ultimately, Amazon is positioning itself to deliver a vertically integrated, future-proof architecture for U.S. government communications. While it may stop short of replicating the Lockheed Martin F-35 playbook, it’s clearly adopting a similar model: offering comprehensive, scalable systems that are difficult to displace. Kuiper even purchases launches on a variety of rockets, creating demand for companies in various congressional districts (in addition to the Bezos owned and funded Blue Origin). With Project Kuiper coming online soon, and AWS already embedded across government, Amazon’s offer may be difficult to ignore or beat… even by Musk.

II. Quote of the Week

“In the recent past, we all discovered what sovereignty and sovereign access to space meant.”

David Cavaillolès, chief executive of Arianespace, in reference to Europe’s recent “launcher crisis” that required Europe to purchase launches from SpaceX. .

III. Immediate Awareness

1 Radian Aerospace has announced plans to develop the Radian Reusable Reentry Vehicle (R3V) as a technology demonstrator for its future spaceplane, while also offering a platform for hypersonic testing applications, expanding its potential into multiple funding avenues, from military to exploration.

2 True Anomaly has raised $260 million in a Series C funding, as well as the $30 million Victus Haze mission under contract with the U.S. Space Force, succeeding in its bet to challenge traditional primes in the defense industry and its single government customer.

3 Learning from US experiences (and more specifically, leader SpaceX), China is advancing its super developing large-diameter stainless steel propellant tanks, including a significant 10.6-meter-diameter prototype, to support the Long March 9 launch vehicle intended for major lunar and deep space missions.

4 The U.S. Space Force is overhauling its surveillance satellite program by replacing its exclusive military-operated Geosynchronous Space Situational Awareness Program (GSSAP) with commercially developed alternatives, aiming to enhance supplier diversity and leverage private sector capabilities for geostationary orbit surveillance, while also spreading the financial risks outside of government.

5 American company Slingshot Aerospace is expanding its international presence by offering sovereign space object tracking systems, hoping to convince countries to allow Slingshot to help integrate monitoring systems that can choose which sources of information wanted, theoretically minimizing reliance on external entities.