The United Launch Alliance (ULA) Vulcan launch vehicle failed to place its payload into Earth orbit. All 40 Amazon Leo broadband satellites on board were lost. According to reports, it is the first mission failure for ULA in twenty years.
The launch took place from Space Launch Complex 41 in Florida. Roughly ten minutes after liftoff, an anomaly occurred that ended the flight. ULA confirmed the incident in a statement on X. The cause of the anomaly has not yet been identified, and the available information does not explain why the rocket failed during this phase of flight.
The loss is particularly severe for Amazon. Project Leo is regarded as Amazon's answer to Starlink, SpaceX's satellite network. So far, Amazon has only launched a small portion of the satellites needed for operation. The failed flight was the first of 38 Vulcan launches that Amazon had booked. This means 40 satellites have already been lost before the network could provide capacity on any meaningful scale.
The Vulcan rocket is a project of ULA, a joint venture that has for years launched for the US military and other government and commercial customers. A failure of this magnitude is rare for the company; the reports describe it as the first loss of a mission in roughly twenty years. For this reason, the incident brings the reliability of a launch system on which several customers depend into focus.
It is currently unclear what consequences the failure will have for the remaining 37 launches. Whether and how the schedule for building out the network will shift is not evident from the information so far. It also remains open when the investigation into the anomaly will be completed and whether it will affect further Vulcan missions. For now, it is clear that Amazon has suffered a significant setback in its race with SpaceX.