Blue Origin, the space company founded by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, has officially moved to build an ultra-high-speed satellite communications network for corporations and governments, challenging the low Earth orbit satellite internet market led by Elon Musk's SpaceX. Blue Origin said on the 21st (local time) that it will build a satellite communications network called "TeraWave," which will provide data speeds of up to 6 Tbps (terabits per second) anywhere on Earth.
TeraWave is a "multi-orbit" satellite constellation that consolidations 5,408 satellites deployed in low Earth orbit (LEO) and medium Earth orbit (MEO) with optical communications. Using optical L.I.N.C to relay large volumes of data quickly over long distances, it touts throughput far beyond consumer standards. Blue Origin plans to begin launching and deploying satellites in the fourth quarter of 2027, and the reusable heavy-lift rocket New Glenn is expected to be the key launch vehicle.
The company said it is optimized for corporations, data centers, and government customers, adding that it will integrate with existing high-capacity communications infrastructure to provide greater path diversity and improve overall network resilience by rerouting traffic during outages. Blue Origin characterized TeraWave as a mission-critical service for enterprise operations rather than for individual consumers and said it designed the system to accommodate up to about 100,000 customers.
The industry expects that, as AI spreads and demand surges for large-scale data processing and stable consolidation, competition to invest in satellite networks will intensify further, dovetailing with the race to build space-based data centers.
SpaceX is said to operate about 10,000 Starlink satellites and have secured more than 6 million users, and Musk has also mentioned a concept for a space data center to complement Starlink. The key question for latecomer Blue Origin is whether it can stabilize the launch cadence of New Glenn to deploy the constellation on schedule.