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“Internet in space” will transform the satellite imagery industry

joemorrison.substack.com

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Re: “Internet in space” will transform the satellite imagery industry

#11

Post by michaelnoguera »

theptip wrote: post #7
rektide wrote: post #6

There were some comments yesterday on tracking subs, talking about the throughput requirements. It made me think about another bit of orbital infrastructure: in-orbit inference engines on satellites, so processing on vast gobs of data can happen without beaming the reams of data down. But yeah, seems like interoperable space protocols are starting up. BACN-Mesh works. Maybe not quite so important & I forget the name…

> in-orbit inference engines on satellites, so processing on vast gobs of data can happen without beaming the reams of data down. It’s a good idea, and I bet folks like Cloudflare that already operate Edge Compute platforms will have a head-start here.

This makes me imagine a space station like data center in orbit that acts like a public cloud on earth, communicating directly with satellites and renting out processing time. I'm not sure how well economies of scale work when you have to pay for every kg you send up there, but it would be an interesting business model.

Re: “Internet in space” will transform the satellite imagery industry

#13

Post by orbital-decay »

qqumut wrote: post #12

[flagged]

Remote sensing is severely limited by latency and throughput of the downlink, as it needs to push mountains of data in a tiny window when the satellite is passing over the ground station once in a while. "Internet in Space" will help to remove (or reduce) this limitation.

Re: “Internet in space” will transform the satellite imagery industry

#14

Post by jvanderbot »

geo-matik wrote: post #8
rektide wrote: post #6

There were some comments yesterday on tracking subs, talking about the throughput requirements. It made me think about another bit of orbital infrastructure: in-orbit inference engines on satellites, so processing on vast gobs of data can happen without beaming the reams of data down. But yeah, seems like interoperable space protocols are starting up. BACN-Mesh works. Maybe not quite so important & I forget the name…

The European Space Agency has already demonstrated on-the-edge processing with Phi-Sat-1. They use AI to detect clouds and only downlink images below a certain cloud cover threshold. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phi-Sat-1

And this was previously demonstrated by NASA on EO-1. (2017 paper)

https://ml.jpl.nasa.gov/papers/wagstaff/wagstaff-eo1-17.pdf

Re: “Internet in space” will transform the satellite imagery industry

#15

Post by strangattractor »

Had a dinner conversation with a person who had worked for military intelligence back in the day. At one time a receiving station was located in Antartica. For Polar orbit satellites this insured reception once per orbit. Since it was so cold the only reliable media for storage they could use was paper tape.

Re: “Internet in space” will transform the satellite imagery industry

#16

Post by jvanderbot »

michaelnoguera wrote: post #11
theptip wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> in-orbit inference engines on satellites, so processing on vast gobs of data can happen without beaming the reams of data down. It’s a good idea, and I bet folks like Cloudflare that already operate Edge Compute platforms will have a head-start here.

This makes me imagine a space station like data center in orbit that acts like a public cloud on earth, communicating directly with satellites and renting out processing time. I'm not sure how well economies of scale work when you have to pay for every kg you send up there, but it would be an interesting business model.

Stop imagining, in 2021 a cluster of computers were sent up to test this, and since then several instruments are in the works to make use of similar (but not same) CPU clusters.

As always, finding a system that is affordable and radiation tolerant is the problem.

Re: “Internet in space” will transform the satellite imagery industry

#17

Post by theptip »

jvanderbot wrote: post #10
theptip wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> in-orbit inference engines on satellites, so processing on vast gobs of data can happen without beaming the reams of data down. It’s a good idea, and I bet folks like Cloudflare that already operate Edge Compute platforms will have a head-start here.

The bottleneck for orbital edge isn't software, it's hardware that can tack into an optical terminal and tolerate radiation. The edge analogy breaks down because the consumer isn't on the edge, the sensor is, and it's just a problem of doing heavy compute next to the sensor, then sending back a summary data product. After that, networking is well understood.

IoT sensor aggregation is already a major edge-compute use-case, it's not just for reducing latency for end-users. In this analogy you're just co-locating the edge compute on the same LAN as the sensor. All of the orchestration, runtime, and framework concerns from existing edge compute systems still apply.

Edge compute isn't solved; it's an area under active and aggressive development. The Cloudflare Workers wasm runtime for example. And if you're selling satelite edge compute, what's your control plane? You need a config store etc.

Put differently; if I'm a satelite operator writing first-party software to run on my satelites, sure, there's no framework code to write, and I can just tailor the software to my satelite platform's hardware. However, if I'm selling colocated compute with ultra-low latency to third parties, then I need to build something that (IMO) looks very close, if not identical, to a current-generation edge-compute platform.

Re: “Internet in space” will transform the satellite imagery industry

#19

Post by georgeg23 »

aml183 wrote: post #3

Joe is one of the most knowledgeable person in the world on satellite imagery. He’s a must read.

This author? According to his LinkedIn he's only been in the space industry for exactly 2 years. This article also reads as very superficial.

Re: “Internet in space” will transform the satellite imagery industry

#20

Post by inetknght »

strangattractor wrote: post #15

Had a dinner conversation with a person who had worked for military intelligence back in the day. At one time a receiving station was located in Antartica. For Polar orbit satellites this insured reception once per orbit. Since it was so cold the only reliable media for storage they could use was paper tape.

> Since it was so cold the only reliable media for storage they could use was paper tape

Sure hope that tape never froze...

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