111–120 of 171 posts
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Maybe they're setting up for customers like SpaceX and the like, with potentially huge satellite arrays.
I would predict the opposite. If you have 4,000 satellites you can justify ground stations but if you have one cubesat you might prefer to rent by the minute.
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.
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There are no “export laws” requiring encryption of satellite transmission data. Export laws wouldn’t apply anyway. As a constructive counter example, there are plenty of free services you can tune into.
NASA telescopes used to be governed by ITAR. They've relaxed those a lot, but you had to use software to transmit the data encrypted all the way to your science pipelines (e.g. Telescope to White Sands to Goddard to $INSTITUTION)
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Eh. Space is just a place that's annoying to ship to. (With the one key advantage of having line-of-sight to arbitrary deployed IoT devices.) "Underwater", meanwhile, is more of a mode of operation / design for data centers, with the goal of that simplifying (and decreasing costs for) cooling. An underwater data center doesn't imply that the data center is actually off-shore to any large degree. I'd imagine they'd lo…
This will accelerate global warming and kill off fragile ecosystems from all the heat being radiated to the oceans.
If a published study on this exists, I'd love to take a look.
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. 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 corre…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would predict the opposite. If you have 4,000 satellites you can justify ground stations but if you have one cubesat you might prefer to rent by the minute.
If you have one cubesat, you'll probably use Starlink (once operational) instead of your own ground station.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Eh. Space is just a place that's annoying to ship to. (With the one key advantage of having line-of-sight to arbitrary deployed IoT devices.) "Underwater", meanwhile, is more of a mode of operation / design for data centers, with the goal of that simplifying (and decreasing costs for) cooling. An underwater data center doesn't imply that the data center is actually off-shore to any large degree. I'd imagine they'd lo…
This will accelerate global warming and kill off fragile ecosystems from all the heat being radiated to the oceans.
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] [1] https://www.descarteslabs.com/
Amazon's offering is geared more towards ground stations, but they might move up the stack and start providing data refinery-type services on top of the ground station work.
Oh, our entire stack is built on Google Cloud Platform.
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.