I'm... not convinced this is a decent offering. At the same time, I'm repeatedly wrong with this whole cloud computing, so maybe I'm just that person stuck with the old ways and telling everyone else they're doing it wrong.<p>But it seems like a recipe that combines so many of the worst parts of running a groundstation. The setup can't easily be specialized enough to really milk capability (say, different ways to correct pointing and orbit determination errors that need more direct control of the antenna than just feeding a TLE), but it's likely so general that there's still significant engineering effort for anybody who wants to use it. If you want to do anything requiring round-trips to the satellite, where you need to ship raw radio signals to a DC, process them in software to demodulate and decode, then encode and modulate your responce before shipping it back as raw radio signals to the groundstation, sorry but that latency is painful and hurts you on link utilization.<p>In comparison, buying a small turn-key dish and operating it is not that bad. Paying per-minute or per-pass gets really expensive for smallsat/cubesat operators, at least at the usual prices I've seen and compared to the operating cost of equipment you own. Also, if you're just running a tech demo then it's not exactly prohibitive to partner with somebody who has excess capacity.<p>I think this offering is missing the mark. If I had to make an analogy, I'd say they're offering roughly "GCP for downlink" to a world that's not quite homogeneous enough for it to make sense. If I were trying to do this, I'd be aiming to be the "Squarespace of downlink" (more tightly scoped capabilities, but much better performance and more turn-key) or someone delivering groundstation-in-a-box kits.<p>Context: I used to work at Planet Labs, having spent considerable time collaborating with the groundstations team, as well as some collaboration with the missions ops team.
Imagine Amazon building and launching satellites like space based data centers. AWS in orbit. You could provision VMs on a satellite equipped with an array of general sensors, cameras, etc.
Sounds like this was built for DigitalGlobe (announced last year they are going all in on AWS and moved ~100PB library into AWS). Satellite directly to S3 sounds perfect for them.
Seems somewhat similar to what Descartes Labs is doing - a "data refinery that combines data from diverse sources, cleans it up and makes it ready for modeling - and a platform to upon which to build living, learning models" [1]<p>[1] <a href="https://www.descarteslabs.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.descarteslabs.com/</a>
Identify high yield market, commoditize, everyone benefits, except the old school and their previously captive audience and mandatory long-term commitments. Sound familiar?<p>I wonder if the same principle could work for telescopes, or are radio telescope designs far too specialized to be a commodity? Huge installations funded in spite political boundaries might be possible in such a scenario
I think there’s going to be an API for everything renissance and this is just another example. As a coder being able to automate all the things and create new businesses, processes, workflows it’s a great time to be a coder.<p>Aka reaching beyond the cloud.
I feel this is an early part of Jeff Bezos's plan to build out the infrastructure needed for space exploration, as he once did to power the Web with AWS.
ViaSat is also trying to do something similar with a "pay by the minutes" usage for their groundstations and communication satellites. Although the main goal for the ViaSat project is continuous coverage so that you can get data from satellites in near real-time.<p><a href="https://www.viasat.com/sites/default/files/media/documents/viasat_real-time_earth_brochure.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.viasat.com/sites/default/files/media/documents/v...</a>
Another amateur radio sidenote for the day[0], SATNOGS[1] performs a similar task by tracking and recording satellite passes of LEO cubesats with amateur radio telemetry and communication payloads via a network of DIY ground stations. Anyone can see a history of any pass of a tracked satellite over a particular station including a RF spectrum waterfall, audio capture, and telemetry output if supported.<p>The SATNOGS receivers, usually a low-cost RTLSDR, cover a much wider spectrum than just amateur bands (which prohibits commercial use of it's spectrum), so I wouldn't be surprised if non-amateur entities are eyeing the service, or if SATNOGS organization is thinking about going commerical (although there's already competition in this field besides AWS Ground Station).<p>[0] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18543454" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18543454</a><p>[1] <a href="https://satnogs.org/" rel="nofollow">https://satnogs.org/</a>
Looks very interesting. Looks like they use the NORAD ID to get frequency information for the various channels? I wonder what frequencies/bands they will support (since this gets down to the RF hardware on the groundstations)?
This is missing so much key information into its usefulness that I really question who this article is geared towards. There's no mention of supported frequency ranges, receiver sensitivity, antenna sizes, polarization, location of the stations. They talk only about downlink, so I assume that this is only for downlink and that there's no uplink possibility, but if there is there's a whole new range of technical specifications that would need to be discussed.<p>I usually say it's 12-18 months between when an AWS service is announced and when it's actually useful and stable enough to use in production. In this case, I'd easily double that.
People with cubesats or interested and willing to help should look into SatNOGS. Running your own ground station is cheap (a $250 investment).<p><a href="https://satnogs.org/" rel="nofollow">https://satnogs.org/</a>
What I would like to see is “satellite as a service” for satellites to have rentable space for uploading code, and accessing their capabilities in a colocated way or full instance only (without breaking them... you’d need to pay to cover the insurance too).<p>It’s far cheaper to send bits to space than actual matter on a rocket.<p>It would also promote re-use of satellites and mitigate Kessler syndrome (unless induced demand makes it worse).
There are a number of satellites with publicly available downlinks (think NOAA weather sats). I'm curious about why I'd need to register that NORAD ID with my AWS account to be able to receive that data - is it just so that the orbital passes will show up appropriately when I want to reserve a contact or something?<p>(Also, the "imaginary" sat that was added to the account in this case was in fact NOAA 15. That one actually transmits realtime imagery to the ground that anyone can receive).
Anyone know how big or sensitive their dishes are? I wonder if they could be used for some fun astronomy stuff when not being used to talk to sats. Also curious about the transcievers and so on. Not sure if they'd disclose any of this due to security concerns.<p>Also, I'm guessing you need to provide your NORAD ID and FCC license so these dishes don't get used for sigint.
How imagine a AWS 2018 planning meeting: Shall we fix the NLB healthchecks or do something cool like with satellites and shit?<p>plz fix you current shit AWS instead of introducing new shit every week
Welcome to the Satellite Hoax - <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6iXxaRjfEY" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6iXxaRjfEY</a>
This is cool but now I'm more concerned in learning how launching micro satellites has become so easy for the masses which would be my opposite reaction normally. Meaning this is not without bad side effects. I watched "in a nutshell" about the end of space in that orbiting debris is becoming an issue as its an exponential threat over time as small debris moving at 20 K mph vaporizes things it comes in contact with, hence more debris, more collisions and so forth eventually creating a death shield to any incoming/outgoing space transport, effectively halting space travel for centuries. Here is that video FYI <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yS1ibDImAYU" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yS1ibDImAYU</a> I don't see how this is helping but possibly there will be cleanup solutions.