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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,

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.

SkyMarshal 7y ago
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?
- mirashii 7y ago
  I worked at a company that with a fleet of microsatellites that also built and managed our own network of groundstations. The costs of groundstations can definitely add up. Scouting for locations with good RF properties takes a lot of long flights, weird dealings with customs (RF equipment is questioned heavily). Then you have to find a site to host it, maybe ask them to beef up their security, construction to support your hardware once it gets above a certain size (dishes and radomes for S and X band comms), network connections and redundant network connections, and a team of people to manage and coordinate all of it. It's certainly its own undertaking and could easily be outsourced to a service with the right specs. Whether AWS's offering here will rise to meet that is yet to be seen.
  - closeparen 7y ago
    >maybe ask them to beef up their security What's the threat model for a ground station? Interception? Sabotage? Hardware theft? Can you even sell these things on eBay?
    - xenophonf 7y ago
      Satellite navigation is a key strategic asset, as is any system that carries national and trans-national communications. Imagine being able to interfere with a navy's navigation, maybe not enough to stop them from getting somewhere but definitely enough to slow them down. Or imagine being able to change the position of a communications satellite, a device that is basically just dumb microwave relay---and microwave, I'll remind you, is highly directional. Or what about getting access to the ground station's network traffic? I'll bet that even when it's encrypted, there's still useful signals intelligence to be gleaned, and when it isn't encrypted (or encrypted badly), boy howdy. Satellites and their attendant infrastructure cost billions of dollars to deploy and maintain. They are incredibly valuable targets, making it worth an attacker's while to penetrate them. This is way beyond simple vandalism or ransomware.
      - closeparen 7y ago
        I would expect ground stations that important to be on military bases, not random locations that a private company is scouting. No?
        kube-system 7y ago
        A ground station can also point at things it's not supposed to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Midnight_broadcast_signal_intrusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Midnight_broadcast_sig...
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      - tracker1 7y ago
        Don't really know any specifics, but I'd imagine being able to use the compromised satellites as simple rams against military satellites could be a significant risk, depending on the size of the fleet... even if not destroying a target. Not to mention just plain destruction of bringing down a fleet of satellites.
  - bradknowles 7y ago
    I did a six month consulting gig for Raytheon on their GPS OCX project — building the next-generation ground control systems to manage the current fleet of GPS satellites, plus the next-generation fleet of satellites. The rule at Raytheon was that Lockheed got the easy end of the job — they just had to design, build, and launch the new fleet. It was Raytheon who got the really hard end of the job, because they had to be able to seamlessly manage both the new and old fleets. I would submit that designing, building, and operating the ground control systems remains the hardest part of the job, even if you don’t have a legacy fleet of satellites that you have to manage on top of the new fleet. Think about it — when you’re doing the operations side of the house, you have to be perfect, all the time. That one time you aren’t perfect and your opsec fails, you lose. The other guys just have to be right once, and they can keep trying and trying and trying indefinitely, until they get that one time they win. That’s definitely the harder job.
- paxys 7y ago
  It's the same argument as - if a company can run a multi-billion dollar operation, can they not afford their own datacenters? They can, but AWS just makes things easier and often cheaper. The core competency of a business you describe is building, launching and maintaining satellites. On-ground network infrastructure, computing hardware, data processing, machine learning etc. is something AWS is a lot more familiar with.
- kylek 7y ago
  Running your own flock is far from the norm. The target is likely the media/broadcast industry.
  - thoraway1010 7y ago
    I came to say this. Some folks just have intermittant needs. I want to a remote hookup for Z minutes at x time from y sat.
d_silin 7y ago
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 $100K. X-band, yeah... But not that many cubesats have X-band transceivers anyway.
- bitminer 7y ago
  This is the classic "make or buy" decision. You can rent by the minute, or own your own. What the Amazon website doesn't cover is: - download guarantee. They rent you the antenna, they don't commit to a successful reception (and consequent refund if it fails) - link status report (needed for a positive confirmation of successful reception.) This is basically a series of SNR measurements - competition with other users of the same antenna: first-come first served? Maybe your spacecraft needs more storage to save the downlink data if the Amazon antenna is busy. And of course they don't talk about the competition.
  - d_silin 7y ago
    Yes, I agree. Comes with probably the same caveats as all other Amazon services.
- namibj 7y ago
  X band reception isn't expensive. LNB + dish is a combination that handles a large part of the X band for <100$. I'm not sure how expensive an X-band uplink is, but I think some satellite internet providers used them, in which case they are also likely <1000$. And it's normally better to just have more redundancy instead of higher individual uptime, at least as long as space, weight and power are not an issue (i.e., on the ground).
akiselev 7y ago
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.
- d_silin 7y ago
  You can get your code on the satellite, effectively getting it for your own use for as little as $0. Right now. This is what ESA OPS-SAT mission is all about.
- wongarsu 7y ago
  > AWS eliminated all capex expenditures You were always able to just rent servers running in someone else's data center. AWS as we know it launched in 2006, [1] is Hetzner's homepage from 2001 offering dedicated servers for $125/month + $125 setup fee. By 2005 [2] you can get a AMD Athlon XP 3000+ with 1 GB RAM and 350GB traffic for 39€/month. 1: https://web.archive.org/web/20010813053224/http://www.hetzner.de/dedi_server.htm#dedi_server.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20010813053224/http://www.hetzne... 2: https://web.archive.org/web/20050507034045/http://www.hetzner.de/entry.html https://web.archive.org/web/20050507034045/http://www.hetzne...
jlgaddis 7y ago
> ... 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-and-process-data-from-orbiting-satellites/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-ground-station-ingest-a...
yongjik 7y ago
They do have some impressive "I didn't know anyone would need that!" services. I also love this one: https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/ 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. (...)
- phinnaeus 7y ago
  They also have Snowballs, which are luggage-sized versions of the Snowmobile that can be shipped. They have a built-in e-ink display for the shipping label.
- closeparen 7y ago
  I wanted a small-scale version of this for my personal photos, back when I realized that uploading a few hundred GB on my 5mbps down/0.5mbps up residential cable connection was going to take weeks. (Ended up doing it from university, where I had symmetric 100mbit in my dorm room).
  - paranoidrobot 7y ago
    That's what the snowballs are for.
    - holmberd 7y ago
      Without a doubt.
  - tim-- 7y ago
    They also have a service where you can ship them a USB hard drive. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/send-us-that-data/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/send-us-that-data/
  - 2J0 7y ago
    This is my view of Renaissance if Internet cafés!
lainga 7y ago
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.
- justizin 7y ago
  pretty sure it's been there for years.
  - dodobirdlord 7y ago
    I believe it was announced in November 2018.

SkyMarshal 7y ago

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?

mirashii 7y ago
I worked at a company that with a fleet of microsatellites that also built and managed our own network of groundstations. The costs of groundstations can definitely add up. Scouting for locations with good RF properties takes a lot of long flights, weird dealings with customs (RF equipment is questioned heavily). Then you have to find a site to host it, maybe ask them to beef up their security, construction to support your hardware once it gets above a certain size (dishes and radomes for S and X band comms), network connections and redundant network connections, and a team of people to manage and coordinate all of it. It's certainly its own undertaking and could easily be outsourced to a service with the right specs. Whether AWS's offering here will rise to meet that is yet to be seen.
- closeparen 7y ago
  >maybe ask them to beef up their security What's the threat model for a ground station? Interception? Sabotage? Hardware theft? Can you even sell these things on eBay?
  - xenophonf 7y ago
    Satellite navigation is a key strategic asset, as is any system that carries national and trans-national communications. Imagine being able to interfere with a navy's navigation, maybe not enough to stop them from getting somewhere but definitely enough to slow them down. Or imagine being able to change the position of a communications satellite, a device that is basically just dumb microwave relay---and microwave, I'll remind you, is highly directional. Or what about getting access to the ground station's network traffic? I'll bet that even when it's encrypted, there's still useful signals intelligence to be gleaned, and when it isn't encrypted (or encrypted badly), boy howdy. Satellites and their attendant infrastructure cost billions of dollars to deploy and maintain. They are incredibly valuable targets, making it worth an attacker's while to penetrate them. This is way beyond simple vandalism or ransomware.
    - closeparen 7y ago
      I would expect ground stations that important to be on military bases, not random locations that a private company is scouting. No?
      - kube-system 7y ago
        A ground station can also point at things it's not supposed to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Midnight_broadcast_signal_intrusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Midnight_broadcast_sig...
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - tracker1 7y ago
      Don't really know any specifics, but I'd imagine being able to use the compromised satellites as simple rams against military satellites could be a significant risk, depending on the size of the fleet... even if not destroying a target. Not to mention just plain destruction of bringing down a fleet of satellites.
- bradknowles 7y ago
  I did a six month consulting gig for Raytheon on their GPS OCX project — building the next-generation ground control systems to manage the current fleet of GPS satellites, plus the next-generation fleet of satellites. The rule at Raytheon was that Lockheed got the easy end of the job — they just had to design, build, and launch the new fleet. It was Raytheon who got the really hard end of the job, because they had to be able to seamlessly manage both the new and old fleets. I would submit that designing, building, and operating the ground control systems remains the hardest part of the job, even if you don’t have a legacy fleet of satellites that you have to manage on top of the new fleet. Think about it — when you’re doing the operations side of the house, you have to be perfect, all the time. That one time you aren’t perfect and your opsec fails, you lose. The other guys just have to be right once, and they can keep trying and trying and trying indefinitely, until they get that one time they win. That’s definitely the harder job.
paxys 7y ago
It's the same argument as - if a company can run a multi-billion dollar operation, can they not afford their own datacenters? They can, but AWS just makes things easier and often cheaper. The core competency of a business you describe is building, launching and maintaining satellites. On-ground network infrastructure, computing hardware, data processing, machine learning etc. is something AWS is a lot more familiar with.
kylek 7y ago
Running your own flock is far from the norm. The target is likely the media/broadcast industry.
- thoraway1010 7y ago
  I came to say this. Some folks just have intermittant needs. I want to a remote hookup for Z minutes at x time from y sat.

d_silin 7y ago

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.

bitminer 7y ago
This is the classic "make or buy" decision. You can rent by the minute, or own your own. What the Amazon website doesn't cover is: - download guarantee. They rent you the antenna, they don't commit to a successful reception (and consequent refund if it fails) - link status report (needed for a positive confirmation of successful reception.) This is basically a series of SNR measurements - competition with other users of the same antenna: first-come first served? Maybe your spacecraft needs more storage to save the downlink data if the Amazon antenna is busy. And of course they don't talk about the competition.
- d_silin 7y ago
  Yes, I agree. Comes with probably the same caveats as all other Amazon services.
namibj 7y ago
X band reception isn't expensive. LNB + dish is a combination that handles a large part of the X band for <100$. I'm not sure how expensive an X-band uplink is, but I think some satellite internet providers used them, in which case they are also likely <1000$. And it's normally better to just have more redundancy instead of higher individual uptime, at least as long as space, weight and power are not an issue (i.e., on the ground).

akiselev 7y ago

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.

d_silin 7y ago
You can get your code on the satellite, effectively getting it for your own use for as little as $0. Right now. This is what ESA OPS-SAT mission is all about.
wongarsu 7y ago
> AWS eliminated all capex expenditures You were always able to just rent servers running in someone else's data center. AWS as we know it launched in 2006, [1] is Hetzner's homepage from 2001 offering dedicated servers for $125/month + $125 setup fee. By 2005 [2] you can get a AMD Athlon XP 3000+ with 1 GB RAM and 350GB traffic for 39€/month. 1: https://web.archive.org/web/20010813053224/http://www.hetzner.de/dedi_server.htm#dedi_server.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20010813053224/http://www.hetzne... 2: https://web.archive.org/web/20050507034045/http://www.hetzner.de/entry.html https://web.archive.org/web/20050507034045/http://www.hetzne...

jlgaddis 7y ago

> ... 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-and-process-data-from-orbiting-satellites/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-ground-station-ingest-a...

yongjik 7y ago

They do have some impressive "I didn't know anyone would need that!" services. I also love this one: https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/ 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. (...)

phinnaeus 7y ago
They also have Snowballs, which are luggage-sized versions of the Snowmobile that can be shipped. They have a built-in e-ink display for the shipping label.
closeparen 7y ago
I wanted a small-scale version of this for my personal photos, back when I realized that uploading a few hundred GB on my 5mbps down/0.5mbps up residential cable connection was going to take weeks. (Ended up doing it from university, where I had symmetric 100mbit in my dorm room).
- paranoidrobot 7y ago
  That's what the snowballs are for.
  - holmberd 7y ago
    Without a doubt.
- tim-- 7y ago
  They also have a service where you can ship them a USB hard drive. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/send-us-that-data/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/send-us-that-data/
- 2J0 7y ago
  This is my view of Renaissance if Internet cafés!

lainga 7y ago

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.

justizin 7y ago
pretty sure it's been there for years.
- dodobirdlord 7y ago
  I believe it was announced in November 2018.