AWS Ground Station

[endymi0n]

This was sufficiently close in timing that I wasn't sure for a moment whether this was just an early caught April Fools.

Then again, the more I think about it, the more this makes sense. Satellite business is hard and capital intensive enough as it is, for starters in the micro-satellite business it would be absolutely prohibitive to run their own hardware just to receive those signals.

[jlgaddis]

> ... I wasn't sure for a moment whether this was just an early caught April Fools.

Nope, this was actually announced [0] about 18 months ago.

---

[0]: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-ground-station-ingest-a...

[yongjik]

They do have some impressive "I didn't know anyone would need that!" services. I also love this one:

https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/

> AWS Snowmobile is an Exabyte-scale data transfer service used to move extremely large amounts of data to AWS. You can transfer up to 100PB per Snowmobile, a 45-foot long ruggedized shipping container, pulled by a semi-trailer truck. (...)

[akiselev]

I don't get how this helps. For startups/individuals, AWS eliminated all capex expenditures except for a single user's computer, which can be had for orders of magnitude cheaper than server hardware, literally. The cost of a cheap but powerful enough laptop or tablet plus keyboard is under $200 now.

Unless you literally do everything by hand (which is a niche, but a tiny one), the cubesat is still going to cost at least 10-50k and the launch 100-400k. In the grand scheme of things, it's not the huge improvement that the rest of AWS infrastructure was.

I think this could be a huge deal for students and academics though. It's not uncommon for companies to give away free secondary/tertiary slots (at least in my experience pre-SpaceX) because the logistics infrastructure is expensive to keep around and they can write off costs that they normally would have to eat. Even if this only shaves 10% off the cost of a sat project, that's a lot of extra money for aerospace clusters like LA, Cal Poly, MIT, etc. and might be enough to start hitting more economies of scale leading to a snowball of development.

Between university machine shops and subsidized labor, Ground Station, and low cost launches once SpaceX volume increases, it might become feasible for student groups to pull off launches for $50-100k total which would be well within the realm of rotary clubs, small-to-medium educational grants, and university budgets.

[lainga]

Huh! Some interesting perspective that it seems so outlandish. I've already seen Ground Station in the AWS console, all by itself in its own category, for the past few months, and thought it was widely-known.

[SkyMarshal]

What’s unclear to me is, if any company can run their own satellite fleet, even micro ones, can they really not afford to run their own ground stations too?

What’s the target customer profile of this service exactly?

[d_silin]

I would say "it depends", when it comes to cost. You can build your own grown station for UHF/VHF bands at under $1000.

S-band and beyond will cost you more, but a fully-featured VHF/UHF/S-band one from a proper vendor will be under $100K.

X-band, yeah... But not that many cubesats have X-band transceivers anyway.

[d_silin]

We also can offer you an actual satellite for rent, starting 2021. Have a look at https://www.exodusorbitals.com

[Uehreka]

I have no use for this right now but will totally file it away in the back of my head for later. My first question would be: If I want to run code on one of your satellites, do I have to place an order for a server to be added to the payload of a future launch vehicle, or do you just launch satellites with servers running on them and then rent out compute/instrument time on a per hour basis?

[ghouse]

SaaS? Satellite as a Service?

[chance_state]

Sorry, but what would be the use case for running code on a satellite?

[Lorin]

Is "3U" the satellite's dimensions as if it's electronic rack equipment? hah.

[elkos]

If you are interested in an open satellite ground-station network, with 330+ ground-station you may want to check out SatNOGS. https://satnogs.org

The SatNOGS Network (https//network.satnogs.org) collects data from hundreds of satellites through hundreds of stations globally. More details on the satellites we monitor are on our satellite database(https://db.satnogs.org). In some cases we are able to visualize the teremetry data on our grafana dashboards(https://dashboard.satnogs.org)

If you are interested in participating on our community, want info to build you own ground-station or get your own equipment on-line don't hesitate to check our wiki(https://wiki.satnogs.org)

disclaimer: I'm a member of the board of Libre Space Foundation(https://libre.space) the non-profit organization developing and operating SatNOGS.

[myself248]

That was my first thought, "oh, it's a commercial satnogs".

Which I suppose proves it's a good idea. :)

[SergeAx]

Amazon has a habit to make it's internal tools into AWS services (while still using them internally). I think it shows a tip of some space-related works inside.

[MAGZine]

to my knowledge, amazon had done a lot of satellite image processing for certain three letter agencies. this is probably related to that more than anything.

[soheil]

Unfortunately looks like this is not available to almost anyone except in rare cases: "To add satellites to your account, please email [email protected] with the NORAD ID, your FCC license information, and your customer account number and someone will contact you."

[jsjohnst]

You’d have both those pieces of information handily available if you had satellites in space. If you don’t have satellites in space, not target customer?

[keithyjohnson]

Thank god I now have an easy way to communicate with all my satellites.

[garmaine]

You joke. But maybe you’ve never considered what satellite data applications you could have written because it wasn’t easy to do in the past?

[mkchoi212]

I thought this was an April fools joke once I clicked on the link. The bandwidth they are operation on (54 MHz) is ridiculous though! Truly sci-fi-ish stuff going on here. Also, did Amazon build this from scratch or did they acquire a company that had the basic infra for this kind of stuff?

[kartikkumar]

Lockheed is building out the ground infrastructure network [1]

[1] https://spacenews.com/amazon-lockheed-venture-casts-shadow-o...

[kartikkumar]

The satellite ground station market is quite dynamic at the moment. As the data generated on-orbit continues to grow, the need for robust ground infrastructure becomes that much more important.

Ground-Station-as-a-Service (GSaaS) is something that AWS stepped into given the fact that AWS is used quite extensively for the data processing chain, so it was a logical play for them to verticalize. AWS partnered with Lockheed to build out the hardware network [1][2].

They've got some decent competition in the market. We published a round-up article of ground station providers a while back [3].

The move to higher frequencies is changing the market substantially. This year, a number of optical ground stations were supposed to be deployed, given growth of satellite terminals [4]. We'll have to see with the virus what actually ends up happening.

[1] https://spacenews.com/amazon-lockheed-venture-casts-shadow-o...

[2] https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/products/verge.html

[3] https://blog.satsearch.co/2019-09-25-ground-station-service-...

[4] https://blog.satsearch.co/2020-01-22-optical-communications-...

Edit: Added/updated references

[jvanderbot]

Talk by Tom Soderstrom[1] of JPL on this from December 19. They announced a partnership last year for various things, including downlink of high definition video from the ISS. [2]

1. Tom is part of the office of information technology office at JPL 2. https://www.geekwire.com/2019/amazon-web-services-nasa-team-...

[flicker-rate]

> To add satellites to your account, please email [email protected] with the NORAD ID, your FCC license information, and your customer account number and someone will contact you.

Does anyone know how to get a NORAD ID?

[d_silin]

Launch a satellite, obviously. But you can look up existing ones at http://celestrak.com

[bagels]

You get one for free if you launch a satellite.

[jsjohnst]

https://www.nesdis.noaa.gov/CRSRA/generalFAQ.html

[p1mrx]

They typically do walk-ins. Just look for the big metal door.

[dbbbbbbbb]

I wonder if this is related to Amazons Project Kuiper satellite broadband constellation, would make sense for them to be building out their ground station capabilities.

[carlio]

Probably more likely an offshoot or requirement from Blue Origin.

[NickNameNick]

Wasn't this announced last year?

[jeffbarr]

Yes it was: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-ground-station-ready-to...

[threeio]

Or you could use something like Satnogs.org ;)

[donkey-hotei]

Thank you.

[o_____________o]

> You can use radar satellite imagery of your various business facilities such as parking lots, logistic centers, and retail stores

Could this be used to monitor someone's home?

[jrockway]

Yes. This is just the ground station, though, you would still need to put a satellite in orbit to receive messages from, however. And remember that it's somewhat expensive in terms of delta-V budget to have the satellite over someone's house exactly when you want it to be. Most people that want to spy on their neighbor will just buy a $30 spy cam with a 4G uplink.

[bitminer]

Monitor their home? No. Imagery from space is only on a 90 minute interval and clouds get in the way. See digitalglobe.com for pricing. It's about $5k per square km iirc.

(With more satellites you can get more frequent coverage of course.)

Radar of course is weatherproof but again the cost is ridiculous unless you are a government or Exxon.

[fergbrain]

Could this be used for downlink only? For example, to pull down NOAA satellite data?

[mdszy]

I'm like 90% sure it would be cheaper to just build your own antenna and an RTL-SDR setup to do that sort of thing yourself. There's no way it's cost effective for that.

[cek]

Kindel's 3rd Law[1] – Amazon will enter every existing business, channel, and market. If said business, channel, or market doesn’t already exist, Amazon will try to invent it.

[1] https://ceklog.kindel.com/2020/03/30/kindels-3rd-law/

[organicfigs]

I'm getting jealous. After a career on the software side of communications (r&d in ble and 4g) I left for the healthcare industry for many reasons but mainly driven by the fact the projects were so monotone. Had I been able to apply to work for a project like this, I surely would have enjoyed staying around longer.

[canada_dry]

Having just finished reading this story https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22718330 the author might want to check out setting up several AWS ground stations. I suspect the cost could be out-of-this-world.

[anuraaga]

Used to work at a startup aiming to create a similar type of network. AWS joining was refreshing for validating the market and providing a big target to work against.

AWS / Lockheed made a good call with phased array antennas (SpaceX too on the satellite side). Can't scale to many different users if your ground stations can only serve one satellite at a time, similar for a satellite providing internet. I suspect there might still be challenges getting enough gain for high bandwidth, but I'm sure it'll improve with better tech. A dish is just physically stuck pointing at one angle.

[grenoire]

Honestly, this is simply sci-fi to me. The fact that we have companies providing satellite communication infrastructure, just extremely futuristic. Am I just too slow with the catching up?

[Antrikshy]

Sort of. This service launched May 2019.

[tekno45]

i mean we have been getting porn from space since like the 80's right?