161–170 of 171 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you have one cubesat, you'll probably use Starlink (once operational) instead of your own ground station.
Is starlink going to work for third party satellite communication? Somehow I assumed that the antennas would be directional towards earth. Also the proposed ground stations are said to be pizza box sized, a bit large for a cubesat if they can't be miniaturized.
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…
Is buying a 'turn-key' dish going to be easier than using their service? I assume the 'can't easily be specialized enough to really milk capability' part also applies to the off-the-shelf system (disclaimer: I know zilch about this). They say it's going to save at least 80% over the cost of operating your own, can only assume they will price it very competitively and have done the math. Hard to say anything without s…
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…
That said, there was significant difficulty in getting a dedicated groundstation due to real estate and licensing issues. So I think that it is still an attractive option for those who may not be able to furnish their own ground station depending on the constraints of the mission.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you give an example of "refined" data versus what one might get through the AWS product? ... in order to demonstrate the sort of tech skills and effort that differentiate the two. I'm basically hoping for some symbol grounding for "data refinery". Also, what's the TAM in your specific market vs the AWS product's market? How has the TAM changed in the past 5 years? Lastly, I heard your head of engineering brews be…
Refined data probably means getting insights from the vast amount of aerial imagery (and related like SAR or elevation model) data that has become available in recent years. Having access to the data is one thing (e.g. Landsat and Sentinel provided by Google, Amazon and other parties), but processing it efficiently is still non-trivial. Examples include Land-Cover-Mapping (mapping pixels to classes like forests, urba…
Satellite data imo sucks, especially aerial imagery. Too many damn clouds to get anything useful in real time haha!
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> Anyone that cares about the data quality they are getting from their satellites is not going to trust a 3rd party solution. Please explain this, I don't understand why it would be the case.
People that record music professionally don't buy an android phone and settle for that because of the severe restrictions on the hardware optimisation it imposes. Likewise, people that are concerned about optimising the radio link are not likely to accept restrictions in the receiver design for instance.
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> Anyone that cares about the data quality they are getting from their satellites is not going to trust a 3rd party solution. Please explain this, I don't understand why it would be the case.
the RF signal that the antenna receives is affected by a number of environmental factors as it travels from the satellite to the antenna.
So I'm curious what factors you are thinking of that would not make sense as part of the service offering but would be needed by would-be customers of the service?
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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That’s because they’re telescopes. NASA’s telescopes are basically spy satellites pointed outwards.
> NASA’s telescopes are basically spy satellites pointed outwards. Literally in at least one case. The NRA donated two surveillance satellites to NASA back in 2012 [1] and the plan is to fly one of them as the WFIRST telescope [2]. I don't think there is a launch date yet. [1] https://www.space.com/16000-spy-satellites-space-telescopes-... [2] https://spaceflightnow.com/2016/02/18/nasa-moves-forward-wit...
NRO damnit
(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).