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How many Amazon Kuiper satellites are in orbit? Leo's fleet

Amazon reported 396 Kuiper satellites launched by July 2026. On October 11, CelesTrak's active list held 391 Amazon Leo satellites, 375 near 630 km up.

By the WatchSat editors · · 8 min read

Florida's city lights at night, with both the Gulf and Atlantic coasts visible under a thin band of green airglow, photographed by NASA astronaut Suni Williams from the International Space Station on November 17, 2024
Image: NASA · Public domain

Amazon has launched 396 satellites for Kuiper, the network it now calls Amazon Leo, and on October 11, 2026, CelesTrak's list of active satellites held 391 of them. Of those, 375 were at or near their working height of about 630 km. How many Amazon Kuiper satellites are in orbit depends on which count you mean. Amazon's 396 counts production satellites and dates from its 14th mission on July 2, 2026, and no Amazon launch has flown since.

CelesTrak's active list, which also feeds our live satellite map, includes every satellite with current orbit data that isn't known to be dead, so 391 counts listed satellites, not confirmed working ones. The 375 is our own tally of those at 620 km or higher. Against the 3,236 satellites the FCC authorized in 2020, about one in eight has been launched.

Project Kuiper and Amazon Leo are the same system, run by the Amazon subsidiary Kuiper Systems LLC and renamed on November 13, 2025. A company vice president called Kuiper an early code name, while Leo nods to low Earth orbit, Via Satellite reported. The tracking catalog still lists each satellite as KUIPER plus a serial number. KUIPER-00662, for instance, was the last of the 29 on the July launch.

Three rockets have carried them. United Launch Alliance's Atlas V flew eight of the 14 missions with 224 satellites, SpaceX's Falcon 9 flew three with 72, and Arianespace's Ariane 64 flew three with 100. Light Reading reported in July that the Atlas V flights were over and ULA's next Amazon mission would use its newer Vulcan. Blue Origin's New Glenn hasn't flown for Amazon yet. A New Glenn booster and upper stage were destroyed on May 28, 2026, in an explosion during a static fire, a ground test of the engines, with no satellites aboard.

Kuiper launch batches in our October 11 snapshot

Every launch gives its payloads a shared international designator, the launch year plus a launch number, with a letter added for each object. Rocket stages and debris get letters too, usually after the payloads, so we counted each batch from its highest Kuiper letter. In the snapshot, the 391 Kuiper satellites make up 2.34% of the list's 16,701 objects and fall into 14 such batches, whose sizes add up to Amazon's 396.

Designator Rocket Launched On the list At 620 km or higher
2025-088 Atlas V 27 27 25
2025-134 Atlas V 27 26 26
2025-151 Falcon 9 24 23 22
2025-171 Falcon 9 24 24 24
2025-217 Atlas V 27 24 23
2025-228 Falcon 9 24 24 23
2025-301 Atlas V 27 27 27
2026-030 Ariane 64 32 32 32
2026-072 Atlas V 29 29 29
2026-095 Atlas V 29 29 29
2026-098 Ariane 64 32 32 32
2026-118 Atlas V 29 29 29
2026-140 Ariane 64 36 36 25
2026-151 Atlas V 29 29 29
Total 396 391 375

Five satellites are missing from the list, one each from 2025-134 and 2025-151 and three from 2025-217. Their catalog numbers are 64512, 64821, 65776, 65777 and 65784. Amazon hasn't said what happened to them. Jonathan McDowell's Kuiper statistics, in a table dated March 2026, logged one early deorbit in each of the Atlas V batches 2025-134 and 2025-217, without giving a cause.

All 391 fly at an inclination, the tilt of the orbit against the equator, of 51.9 degrees, and 363 sit within 1 km of their median height of about 630 km. We measure height above Earth's equatorial radius of 6,378 km, as CelesTrak's catalog does. Amazon's 2020 license splits the constellation into three shells, layers of satellites at one height and tilt. Everything launched so far went to the 630 km shell, approved for 1,156 satellites, so the 396 would fill 34.3% of it. The two lower shells, 784 satellites at 590 km and 1,296 at 610 km, hold 64% of the authorized total and are still empty in our data.

New satellites start lower and raise their own orbits with onboard thrusters. Across our nine snapshots from September 15 to October 11, the Kuiper count stayed at 391, but the number at 620 km or higher rose from 351 to 375. Eight satellites from the 36-satellite Ariane batch, 2026-140, were still climbing between October 8 and 11 at 2 to 7.5 km a day, the fastest being KUIPER-00555 at 534 km. Eight others below 620 km barely moved. Five of those came from 2025 launches and sit low, four between 437 and 451 km and one at 542 km, and Amazon hasn't said why they're holding there.

When will Amazon Leo service start?

As of mid-October 2026, we found no report that commercial service had begun. Amazon opened an enterprise preview to selected business customers, JetBlue among them, in November 2025. The Next Web reported an enterprise beta from April 8, 2026, with commercial service then aimed at mid-2026. By early July the target had slipped, and Amazon expected service to start later this year, Light Reading reported. The first countries would be the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France and Germany, Heise reported.

Amazon showed three terminals at the rebrand. Leo Nano, a 7-inch (17.8 cm) square, is rated at up to 100 Mbps download, and the 11-inch Leo Pro at up to 400 Mbps. Leo Ultra, an antenna for businesses, is rated at up to 1 Gbps down and 400 Mbps up. These are Amazon's maximums, and we found no independent speed tests or published prices.

Coverage depends on the orbit. A satellite tilted 51.9 degrees never passes farther north or south than 51.9 degrees latitude. Amazon hasn't published how high above the horizon a dish needs to see a satellite. If it's 30 degrees, our geometry puts the edge of coverage near 60 degrees latitude, which leaves the far north and far south outside the fleet's reach as built.

SpaceX said on October 6, 2026, that it had more than 11,000 Starlink satellites in orbit. Our snapshot holds 11,129 Starlinks against 391 Kuiper satellites, more than 28 to one. SpaceX can also point to measured speeds, a median US download of nearly 200 Mbps from mid-2025 data, while Amazon hasn't published any.

Kuiper flies higher. Its median of about 630 km is 164 km (102 miles) above the 466 km median of the Starlink satellites in the same snapshot, and SpaceX is moving its shells below 500 km. Our explainer on how Starlink works covers its shells and dishes.

Astronomers have measured Amazon's satellites too. Anthony Mallama and six co-authors analysed 1,938 brightness observations and found a mean apparent magnitude of 6.28, on a scale where lower numbers mean brighter. In operational mode, 92% were brighter than the limit the International Astronomical Union recommends to protect research. A quarter were bright enough, in the authors' terms, to distract from the aesthetic appreciation of the night sky. They liken the satellites' reflectivity to that of Starlink Version 1, SpaceX's first-generation design. Two referees assigned by the IAU's Centre for the Protection of the Dark and Quiet Sky reviewed the paper, submitted on January 12, 2026. It was still a preprint, posted ahead of journal publication, when Sky & Telescope covered it. Our post on satellite streaks and astronomy covers what bright satellites do to telescope images.

Did Amazon meet the FCC's July 2026 deadline?

No. The FCC's 2020 authorization required half the constellation to be launched and operating by July 30, 2026, and all of it by July 30, 2029. In January 2026 Amazon asked for 24 more months on the halfway mark, to July 31, 2028, or else a waiver, a one-off exemption from the rule. It blamed delays with the rockets it had booked, Bloomberg Law reported.

On June 5, 2026, in order DA 26-553, the FCC's Space Bureau granted a limited waiver with conditions instead of the extension. The order counts the first-generation system as 3,232 satellites, slightly fewer than in 2020, which puts the halfway mark at 1,616. Satellites launched after the July 2026 date temporarily lose spectral priority, their rank when networks share the same radio frequencies. The demotion lasts 20 months, to March 30, 2028, or until half the constellation is launched and operating, if that comes first. The 2029 deadline stands, and if Amazon misses it, the authorization shrinks to the number of satellites operating on that date.

When the deadline passed, Amazon's 396 satellites were 24.5% of the 1,616 needed. To finish all 3,232 by July 30, 2029, it needs 2,836 more in the 33.6 months after October 11, about 84 a month. Its 14 launches so far averaged one every 33 days and 28 satellites a month, so it would need three times that pace.

As of October 11, 101 days had passed since Amazon's last launch. Launch Library, the database behind our launch schedule, lists Vulcan's first Amazon Leo mission, LV-01, for no earlier than October 29 and the next Ariane 64, LE-04, for October 31. Both are still marked to be determined. Either flight would put a 15th Kuiper batch on the list and add to the launch count for 2026.

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