Re:AWS Ground Station
by chakspak on Monday December 27, 2021 @06:47PM
(#29708387)
Holy wow, it never occurred to me that there were enough organizations launching satellites to warrant creating a managed service to support it.
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Re:AWS Ground Station
by sydthrowaway on Monday December 27, 2021 @07:29PM
(#29708735)
There isn't. This is some VP's pet project .
Re:AWS Ground Station
by awsthro00945 on Monday December 27, 2021 @09:41PM
(#29709683)
It's not that. Like most niche AWS services, this was likely the "pet project" of a major AWS customer that wanted something like this as part of a major business agreement [0]. And then after building it for that customer, AWS also expanded offering it to anyone else who wants to use it.
0: https://blog.maxar.com/earth-intelligence/2018/sending-data-... (posted the same day Ground Station was launched in 2018)
I had no idea this was the case. I've often wondered why these niche services have marketing pages which appear to appeal to the masses.
Re:AWS Ground Station
by vineyardmike on Monday December 27, 2021 @09:30PM
(#29709629)
Its probably a commercialization of a tech they already had to create to handle project kuiper. Which is Bezos's pet project.
The overlap in work required to build AWS Ground Station and to build a production ground station network for a constellation like Kuiper seems fairly minimal [1], but it does seem like an ok way to get their feet wet while they don’t have any real satellites of their own flying.
1. Kuiper uses a different RF band (Ka vs X or S), needs an order of magnitude more ground stations, doesn’t need all the *aaS infrastructure bits)