The statement followed a tweet from Musk, the richest person according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
The richest people in the world are watching it in front of the American regulators on the celestial buildings for their satellite fleets.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX has asked the Federal Communications Commission for permission to operate Starlink communications satellites in a smaller orbit than first planned.
Amazon.com Inc., by Jeff Bezos, says the move would risk interference and collisions with its planned Kuiper satellites, which, like Starlink, are designed to transmit Internet service from space.
A dispute that would normally be limited to regulatory filings spills over into the public eye, in a spit that features the big personalities involved as billionaires pursue dreams in the sky.
“The changes proposed by SpaceX are those that would hinder competition between satellite systems,” Amazon wrote on Twitter on Tuesday from its official news account. “It’s clearly in SpaceX’s interest to stifle swing competition if they can, but it’s certainly not in the public interest.”
Amazon.com Inc., by Jeff Bezos, says the move would risk interference and collisions with its planned Kuiper satellites, which, like Starlink, are designed to transmit Internet service from space.
The statement followed a tweet from Musk, the richest person according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
“It doesn’t serve the public to paralyze Starlink today for an Amazon satellite system that is at most a few years away,” Musk said in a tweet response to CNBC journalist Michael Sheetz’s cover.
Space Exploration Technologies Corp. has launched more than 1,000 satellites for its Starlink Internet service and is registering early customers in the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada. Amazon won FCC permission last year for a fleet of 3,236 satellites and has yet to launch any.
Amazon earlier asked the FCC to reject SpaceX’s request for lower orbits. He said the change will put SpaceX satellites in the middle of the Kuiper orbits, according to the agency’s filings.
SpaceX rejected appeals to the FCC, saying its plans would not increase interference with what it called Amazon’s “stillborn plans.”
A lower orbit allows faster internet service because the signal does not travel that far. SpaceX told the FCC that having satellites closer to Earth reduces the risk of space debris because they would fall out of orbit faster than higher spacecraft.
SpaceX eventually plans to operate about 12,000 satellites and has won FCC approval for about 4,400 birds, including 1,584 at 550 kilometers – where it currently orbits its satellites. The company is requesting permission to arrange another 2,824 satellites at approximately the same altitude, rather than twice as high as originally proposed.
(Except for the title, this story was not edited by NDTV staff and is published in a syndicated stream.)