SPACE/COSMOS
Amazon selects Kenya for first African satellite gateway in Project Kuiper challenge to Starlink
Amazon.com Inc (NASDAQ:AMZN), the US technology and e-commerce group founded by Jeff Bezos, has officially selected Kenya as the location for its first African satellite Internet ground station through its Project Kuiper network and intensifying competition with Elon Musk’s Starlink across the continent.
The facility, known as a satellite gateway or ground station, will serve as a critical link between Amazon’s low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites and terrestrial Internet networks, enabling data transmission between users and the company’s planned satellite constellation, Techpoint Africa writes.
Amazon, through its local subsidiary Amazon Kuiper Kenya Limited, has applied to the country’s Communications Authority (CAK) for a licence to operate communications infrastructure. Regulatory approval would pave the way for the company to launch satellite broadband services in Kenya as Project Kuiper, rebranded for consumers as Amazon Leo, moves towards commercial deployment.
“For Kenya, this is more than just another foreign tech investment. It places the country at the centre of a fast-moving global connectivity battle, where satellite Internet is becoming a serious alternative to fibre and mobile networks, especially in rural and underserved regions,” Techpoint Africa writes.
“For users, it could eventually mean faster Internet access in remote areas, improved digital inclusion, and cheaper backhaul for mobile operators. For government, it strengthens Kenya’s positioning as a regional tech hub while also raising regulatory questions around data sovereignty and infrastructure control.”
Conventional broadband networks, which rely on fibre-optic cables and mobile towers, have struggled to reach remote and low-density areas due to high deployment costs, leaving large segments of the population underserved.
LEO satellite systems offer an alternative by delivering connectivity directly from space to user terminals on the ground, enabling faster speeds and lower latency compared to legacy satellite technologies.
Amazon’s satellite broadband initiative is designed to deliver high-speed Internet connectivity globally through a network of more than 3,200 low Earth orbit satellites. The project is widely viewed as Amazon founder Jeff Bezos's response to the Starlink network, which has already established operations in several African markets, including Kenya. Starlink, owned by billionaire Elon Musk's SpaceX, is now the country’s eighth-largest Internet service provider with more than 22,000 subscribers.
In Sub-Saharan Africa, internet penetration stands at about 36%, according to the ITU estimates. In Kenya, penetration is estimated at about 48%, with more than 27mn users out of a population of over 56mn, based on DataReportal and CAK estimates.
Kenya represents a strategic entry point in the continent’s fast-growing digital economy, where demand for high-speed Internet remains constrained by gaps in traditional infrastructure, particularly outside major urban centres. Starlink has been operating in the country since 2023 and has steadily expanded its customer base among businesses, households and rural users seeking alternatives to conventional Internet services.
Amazon applied in April for a Network Facilities Provider (NFP) Tier 2 licence to operate in Kenya, valid for 15 years. The licence carries an upfront cost of around $115,000 and requires at least 30% local ownership within three years of approval, reflecting Kenya’s push to ensure foreign telecom entrants embed local participation and submit structured rollout plans.
The decision to establish a ground station represents the first major physical infrastructure commitment by Amazon in Africa. The move comes as global technology companies increasingly view the continent as a key growth market for broadband connectivity, driven by rising Internet demand, expanding digital economies and persistent gaps in network coverage.
Meanwhile, Starlink has expanded rapidly across Africa and is now active in markets including Nigeria, Rwanda, Mozambique, Malawi and Zambia, according to company and regulatory data.
It has also partnered with Airtel Africa Plc (LSE:AAF), the telecom operator majority-owned by Bharti Airtel Ltd (NSE:BHARTIARTL), which in March conducted a pilot test in Kenya with Starlink to trial satellite-to-mobile connectivity.
The test was conducted in remote “no connectivity” zones where traditional mobile networks do not reach, ahead of a planned rollout across Airtel’s 14 African markets, including Nigeria, Uganda, Tanzania, Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
The trial demonstrated basic data and messaging services, including WhatsApp calls and messaging, maps navigation, Facebook Messenger, and financial transactions through the Airtel app.
MIT Astronomers Discover The Earliest Known Flickering Quasar
June 9, 2026
By Eurasia Review
A supermassive black hole lies at the heart of every galaxy, including the Milky Way. When a black hole is active, it pulls material in as a whirlpool of high-temperature gas and dust. As this cosmic material piles up and falls onto a black hole, it lights up its vicinity, radiating a huge amount of energy.
The most energetic supermassive black holes are known as quasars, and they are some of the most active and luminous objects in the universe. These voracious systems take in so much material that the energy they emit can outshine all the light in the surrounding galaxy. The pattern of light from a quasar can give scientists clues to how active supermassive black holes shape the galaxies around them.
Now astronomers at MIT and elsewhere have detected a quasar flickering from the very early universe. The scientists traced the light from the quasar back to the “cosmic dawn,” just 850 million years after the Big Bang. The discovery represents the earliest flickering quasar detected to date.
“Although there have been a lot of quasars found in the cosmic dawn, this is the first time we actually see one flickering,” says Gene Leung, a postdoc in the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research.
The quasar’s flicker enabled the researchers to determine that, surprisingly, the ancient quasar’s whirlpool of gas and dust, known as an accretion disk, resembled a flat pancake, similar in shape to that of more modern-day quasars.
Their findings add to a longstanding mystery in cosmology: Why do supermassive black holes exist so early in the universe’s history? Physicists have assumed that a flat accretion disk reflects a relatively mature black hole that is in a calm and stable state. Black holes that are just starting to form, like those in the very early universe, should be more unsettled systems, with accretion disks that appear more puffy and chaotic.
The flat accretion disk around this very early quasar heightens the mystery of how supermassive black holes can grow and mature in a very short amount of cosmic time.
“I think what this suggests is that all the messy, very rapid growth phases that we expect all black holes to go through at some point happen very, very early on, before we see them as these very bright luminous quasars,” says Anna-Christina Eilers, assistant professor of physics at MIT. “That’s the picture that’s emerging.”
Eilers, Leung, and their colleagues report their results in a paper appearing in Nature Astronomy. Their co-authors include members of MIT Kavli and multiple other institutions.
Past a pinprick
A supermassive black hole can be billions of times more massive than the sun. These gravitational giants are the central “engines” of most galaxies, helping to regulate a galaxy’s star formation and growth.
“Without supermassive black holes, no galaxy would look the way it does today,” Eilers says. “Black holes play a major role in shaping how galactic ecosystems look.”
It was long assumed that it should take more than a billion years for the first galaxies to settle and mature, so scientists didn’t expect to see supermassive black holes in the very early universe. But observations since the early 2000s showed otherwise. Scientists have spotted more than 200 supermassive black holes in the universe’s first billion years. Such objects were detectable because they were in an extremely active quasar phase, giving off enormous blasts of radiation that could be seen from Earth, 13 billion light years away.
These earliest quasars were observed as pinpricks of light, which signal the existence of a supermassive black hole at early times. But from these bright and distant dots, scientists aren’t able to tell much more about the black holes and their cosmic dawn environments. To do so, they need to catch a quasar’s “flicker.”
“People have known that quasars in the nearby universe can flicker,” Leung says. “The flickering comes from fluctuations in the way the gas is being fed into the black hole. And how a quasar flickers tells us something about the structure of a black hole’s accretion disk, and the kind of ‘bites’ that the black hole is eating.”
Mapping a flicker
Leung and Eilers looked to detect a flickering quasar from the early universe in hopes of learning more about the shape and structure of the earliest supermassive black holes. To do so would be a technical challenge: The further back in time and space an object is, the more distorted its light appears. This effect is due to the expanding universe, which effectively stretches, or “redshifts” light to redder, longer wavelengths. The same stretching occurs in time: Any flicker that naturally occurs over several weeks, for instance, would appear stretched out, flickering only every few months when seen from billions of light years away.
To spot a flickering quasar from the cosmic dawn, the team needed to observe the distant universe at redder wavelengths, and specifically within the infrared spectrum, and over long timescales of many years.
“This was the technical challenge we had to overcome,” Eilers says. “We needed data at longer, infraredwavelengths taken repeatedly over very long timescales.”
The team ultimately found a flicker in data collected by NASA’s Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) mission — a space-based infrared telescope that scanned the entire sky over a total of about 14 years. Former MIT postdoc Kishalay De, who is now a faculty member at Columbia University, had launched a project to re-process archival data from NEOWISE. Based on the re-processed data, the team unearthed a signal, from just 850 million years after the Big Bang, which was confirmed to be the earliest flickering quasar.
“We saw the quasar flickering randomly over the 14-year period, much like a candle’s flame flickers without a fixed pattern,” Leung notes.
They estimate that the quasar is as bright as 12 trillion suns, and it is flickering by about 20 percent, meaning that it fluctuates up and down, by a brightness of about 2 trillion suns.
The researchers also tracked how the quasar’s light flickered over several different wavelengths. The wavelength of light reflects a certain temperature of the material that is emitting the light. The closer material is to a black hole, the hotter it is. Researchers can therefore use wavelengths of light to map the shape and structure of material within the accretion disk around a black hole.
Using NEOWISE data, the team analyzed the quasar’s flicker to determine the shape of the accretion disk surrounding the central supermassive black hole. They found that the disk is surprisingly thin and flat — a structure that astronomers mostly see around nearby, older black holes, that have had much longer to settle and mature.
“This provides direct evidence that the same feeding processes and structures observed in the nearby universe were already in place at very early times, despite very different cosmic environments, which had never been seen before,” Eilers says.
“This means something happened even earlier on that led to these systems to look so mature,” Leung adds.
The team hopes to peer even further back in cosmic time to catch a quasar’s earlier, premature development. Then, scientists can start to piece together the conditions that brewed up the first supermassive black holes.
This research was supported, in part, by NASA.
Artemis III: Luca Parmitano selected for next stage of NASA's lunar landing mission
NASA has unveiled the Artemis III crew for a proposed 2027 mission to test key Earth-orbit technologies ahead of sending a human crew to the Moon.
Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano will pilot Artemis III**,** NASA confirmed on Tuesday, one of the key missions to prepare a human crew to return to the moon for the first time since 1972.
Parmitano's inclusion underlines the central role played by Europe in the new phase of space exploration.
The mission, currently scheduled for the second half of 2027, will not head directly to the Moon. It will instead be an experimental flight in low-Earth orbit, designed to test key procedures and technologies, in particular those related to docking between NASA's Orion capsule and the lunar landing modules - known as pathfinders.
At an event at Houston's Johnson Space Center, Parmitano called Italy his "launchpad" into space and the European Space Agency (ESA) a bridge, before dubbing NASA "the rocket, figuratively and literally."
Luca Parmitano is in the European Astronaut Corps for the ESA and was the first Italian and third European to command the International Space Station during an expedition in 2019/2020.
In addition to Parmitano, the Artemis III crew will include US astronauts Andre Douglas, Frank Rubio and Randy Bresnik, with Bob Hines serving as backup.
All of them have been chosen to take part in a series of complex operational tests that are vital for the future lunar missions of the Artemis programme.
During the mission, the Space Launch System rocket will carry the astronauts into orbit, where rendezvous and docking manoeuvres will be simulated between Orion and the lunar lander modules supplied by Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin and Elon Musk's SpaceX.
These operations are among the most delicate stages to negotiate if humans are to return to the Moon, as they demand absolute precision when linking spacecraft together in space.
The Artemis programme brings together numerous international space agencies. The European Space Agency supplies key components for the Orion spacecraft, while the Italian Space Agency is manufacturing habitation modules intended for multiple uses on the lunar surface.
The shared goal is to build a stable infrastructure for exploration beyond Earth's orbit, paving the way for increasingly long and complex missions.
Funding round for Polish-led space tech firm ICEYE values it at €10bn
Finland-based space technology company ICEYE said on June 9 it had completed a €1bn funding round that valued the company at over €10bn, driven by growing government demand for sovereign intelligence systems.
The company, which features a Polish CEO and co-founder, has established itself as a major provider of space-based intelligence, with seven European governments procuring its sovereign satellite systems to date.
"The company has raised €450mn in a primary series F funding round led by General Atlantic, at a valuation of over €10bn. Additional investors include Solidium, Tesi, Varma, Ilmarinen, Lifeline Ventures, as well as Nokia, from Finland, Qatar Investment Authority (QIA) and TCV. Together with a secondary placement, the total Series F funding round exceeds €1bn," ICEYE said in a press release.
The company stated that proceeds from the funding round will drive the expansion of its global footprint and deepen its intelligence capabilities, positioning it to deliver sovereign intelligence systems and data to governments and customers at a new scale.
"The quality of investors who have chosen to back us at this scale reflects a shared belief. Sovereign intelligence from space is entering a new era and the window to build it is now. ICEYE has built the world's most advanced, proven capability to meet that demand. This funding enables us to accelerate the delivery of new capabilities to governments and customers faster than ever before," Rafal Modrzewski, Co-Founder & CEO of ICEYE, said as cited in the press release.
The capital injection follows a period of financial growth for the firm. In 2025, ICEYE scaled growth, profitability, and cash generation simultaneously - crossing over €250mn in revenue, and over €100mn in EBITDA, while building a contracted backlog of over €1.5 bn.
To meet expanding demand, ICEYE is doubling its production capacity from 50 satellites per year today to a target of 100 annually by 2028 and beyond, supported by a matching launch cadence, according to the release.
The announcement follows the recent delivery of a fully operational sovereign space system to the Polish Armed Forces, achieved within 12 months from contract signing to operational capability. ICEYE noted that this deployment, among the fastest in history, is now being replicated across Europe, the Middle East and Asia as the pace of adoption accelerates.
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