Yes. This is just the ground station, though, you would still need to put a satellite in orbit to receive messages from, however. And remember that it's somewhat expensive in terms of delta-V budget to have the satellite over someone's house exactly when you want it to be. Most people that want to spy on their neighbor will just buy a $30 spy cam with a 4G uplink.
Surveillance satellites aren't normally in geostationary orbits either, as that's too far away for the optics. Your deltav comment alludes to it. They seem to be into highly elliptical orbits.
You would need an insane amount of LEO satellites in order to get a feed which was continuous. I don't even know how to start doing the maths on this one.
Well, you're not going to be able to make out a house from 100x farther away either.
Thanks to Trump's inability to not tweet anything he sees, we know that Block 4 KH-11 satellites have a 10cm/pixel about standard (they're in an elliptical orbit, but they use which ever is closest at the time). So we're looking at a 10M/pixel in geostationary orbit, assuming you can get the same optics that NROL was shipping up as late as 2013.
His actions are sort of the worst of both worlds here. On one hand leaking information that's only useful to geopolitical adversaries (probably because he didn't understand the implications of tweeting stuff like that), and on the other hand being a new bar for destruction of public records when it comes to decisions made by the administration (somehow even beating out the Obama administration).
Why do you think it was a secret to anyone? Any amateur astronomer can figure it out from mirror size and orbital parameters.
A 1968 NASA publication (sold for $3.00) discusses various limitations, concluding: "The telescope objective for best resolution, as viewed from a satellite at an altitude of 320 kilometers, requires a diameter of about 1.6 meters to resolve a 12-centimeter radius" https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/196900...
That approximately 10 cm resolution has always been a resonable guess of the capabilities of best spy satellites. Trump's tweet surprised no-one. It confirmed what has always been thought to be true.
But if a $30 spy cam with 4G uplink was detected by the marks anti-surveillance regime (https://www.bastille.net/cell-phone-detection) you could be talking a huge liability. Might be more discreet to use satellites with lower cost if things don't work out so great.
I know that some have worked on this... but have given thought to how one could use lower power hives/swarms in order to do surveillance. Not so much for spying on neighbors but virtual tours of national parks and monuments, stitching many photos together to form 3D tour space.
High end capacitors over batteries, and a swarm where individual drones come home to charge, keeping roughly 1/3-1/2 in reserve and accounting for flight times to/from target area...
For less coverage, of course, less drones would be needed. Getting down closer to the size between a large bug and small bird's body for total size would probably be needed as well for a bit of stealth... noise is another concern. Interesting work/ideas.
Monitor their home? No. Imagery from space is only on a 90 minute interval and clouds get in the way. See digitalglobe.com for pricing. It's about $5k per square km iirc.
(With more satellites you can get more frequent coverage of course.)
Radar of course is weatherproof but again the cost is ridiculous unless you are a government or Exxon.
I'm like 90% sure it would be cheaper to just build your own antenna and an RTL-SDR setup to do that sort of thing yourself. There's no way it's cost effective for that.
Not with the example given of NOAA satellites. Those simply broadcast data on regular intervals. If you had to authenticate, can you imagine a single satellite dealing with all the traffic of uplink/downlink required for authentication? It simply wouldn't work or maky any sense.
This is not true for all satellites, obviously. There are private ones that use encrypted communications, but weather satellites can be easily used if you have the proper antenna and equipment setup to do so.
> To add satellites to your account, please email aws-groundstation@amazon.com with the NORAD ID, your FCC license information, and your customer account number and someone will contact you.
"You can connect with any satellite in low Earth orbit (LEO) and medium Earth orbit (MEO) operating in X-band and S-band frequencies, including: S-band uplink and downlink, X-band narrowband and wideband downlink."
They have some information about the frequencies stuffed at the bottom of their FAQs. One omission that bugs me is that they don't tell you the location of the ground stations, which can be a dealbreaker for whether or not this is effective
How might this impact hedge funds and equity trading strategies? They specifically mention parking lots which I interpreted as gaining sales metrics and throughput data on businesses.
Honestly, this is simply sci-fi to me. The fact that we have companies providing satellite communication infrastructure, just extremely futuristic. Am I just too slow with the catching up?
This is ridiculous and I love it. Do your satellites have cameras that can be interfaced with as well? Could I have a satellite monitoring a specific area 24/7?
Understandable - could I instead strategically rent time slots for when the satellite passes over a certain location? That's not 24/7, but once a day for basic data science is certainly enough.
I'm actually a bit sorry to derail the grandparent (totally fine !) sales process :) but if what you want is daily imagery of a specific place for data science purpose, check out Planet Labs, they do just that !
Thanks for the mention. I can't seem to find any mention of pricing on the Planet Labs website; do you have any idea what it should come out to if I take a picture of a 3x3 mile square every day for a month?
Ah no, cubesats use a different definition of "1U" which is a 10x10x10 cm cube (1L volume). So a 3U satelitte will be 30x10x10 cm box with a 3L volume and mass around 4-5kg
I have no use for this right now but will totally file it away in the back of my head for later. My first question would be: If I want to run code on one of your satellites, do I have to place an order for a server to be added to the payload of a future launch vehicle, or do you just launch satellites with servers running on them and then rent out compute/instrument time on a per hour basis?
- space-qualification for the satellite control software. You need to test your own flight software in space, so you use our satellite platform to run test/validation and then reuse on your own satellite.
- space-based algorithm tests, such as data compression/error correction or radiation hardening through software means. Inter-satellite link protocols is also a rich field for software developers.
- data analysis: satellite instruments can produce a lot more data than can be downlinked, so it is in your best interest to pre-process it as much as possible on-board instead of downloading just raw data
- Autonomy algorithms tests: for example for automatic collision avoidance software or maneuvres around non-cooperating target (think defunct satellite or asteroid)
- Data fusion: combine data from multiple satellite instruments, such AIS receiver and imagery to filter maritime traffic for ships without AIS transponders on, then classify those
- Remote asset tracking and labeling (think pipelines, agriculture, shipping containers, farming plots) where you don't have "eyes on the ground". Needs some image recognition tools to identify changes and/or damage.
All of the above can be packed as an "app" and run concurrently or in series on one or multiple satellites, with the possibility of reusing the code for different satellite platforms.
An interesting case is making a single "virtual satellite" out of multiple physical ones, with a single app using instruments from different satellites.
Great question and answers here, fascinating to consider potential use cases. Have you thought about adapting this copy for your website so more people can see the potential when they arrive there?
Right now we have no satellites of our own, but later in 2020 we will get a limited level of access to one satellite from ESA. Come 2021, we will get our own satellite in orbit.
Will you be able to 'geofence' your code? Yes, absolutely!
If you guys make an “I put my code in orbit” badge (virtual and/or physical) I will wear it...! That’s another use case - vanity! I’m not being sarcastic, I’d love this.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Very few commercial satellites carry enough maneuvering fuel to ram any military satellite. And none of them are equipped with the sensors needed for an intercept.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Hetzner's pricing is a reflection of the generally lower price level in Europe. Dedicated server providers with US datacenters do exist, but their pricing is much closer to Amazon's.
A lot of the cheap Hetzner boxes are using consumer hardware. The EX line starting at 40€/month are using 6th generation i7 CPUs. The AX line is using 3rd gen Ryzen CPUs.
If you want actual server-grade hardware, you'll end up with around 90€/month, other hosters are more expensive. I'd assume this would explain some of the price difference
Maybe. But honestly AMD server HW is <50% more expensive than their non-server hardware. Also their consumer chips do offer ECC support, and you don't need anything else really for those applications.
> 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. (...)
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.
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).
I think the same customer (Digital Globe, an earth imagery LEO satellite operator) was on stage at both announcements. Snowmobile for getting PB of data from their ground network into AWS and Ground Station to get it there directly from space
With instructions for how to use in both Windows and Linux.
Unfortunately even though it was "GA", it appears that they never really actually tested using it in Linux.
I submitted (and they were merged) a number of documentation bugfixes related to Linux.
Two firmware updates later, one bricked disk, one which failed to verify the copied data -- and 9 months of time all down the drain.
This reason is why I will never use Azure. It wasn't the bugs and device failures that was the problem. Just the sheer work in having to teach Azures' support staff about their own product (after fighting to get them to record the support case -- you normally can't raise one if you don't pay).
Why did I pick Azure for this?
Because (at the time) both GCP and AWS catered for 100Gb+ volumes. And we were (and remain) around 50Gb.
I haven't re-evaluated to see if either GCP or AWS have better options now.
I work on Google Cloud and have an obvious bias here, but having thought about this for a couple year now, this does not seem like a good or cost-effective way to move that much data.
In particular if you have ~100PB of data to move and you are in a location that can be reached by a 45-foot long shipping container on a truck with access to the ~350KW of power it takes to run Snowmobile, you're clearly not somewhere _completely_ inaccessible. Given that 100PB of data will cost you $400k/mo in storage costs on AWS Glacier (before the discounts that you'll obviously negotiate for), even relatively remote locations become "accessible" for 100 Gbps+ fiber or microwave connectivity, and _very_ remote locations for tens of Gbps. The Snowmobile itself is only 1 Tb/s, so if you think you're going to save time this work, consider how long it takes to move it to you and then move it to an AWS facility versus the time it takes to fill it.
I don't get where this is the right call for _any_ customers, even as a one-off. I'd love it if someone from AWS could tell me where my math is off on this.
It reads to me like you're saying: if you're going to spend $400k/month on storage cost, why not pay for a network buildout too? I don't think that allocating X per month for op-ex implies that you also have Y amount of money to spend on cap-ex... especially if you don't own the location. 350kw of power is just another trailer to pull up.
I am assuming that anyone who managed to accumulate 100 PB of data (or close enough to make this viable) is still accumulating data at a solid clip, or likely has a lot _more_ than just 100 PB of data
There is your first mistake: thinking the customer wants to solve the problem in a a good or cost-effective way.
Snowmobile was built because a pre-sales engineer sarcastically said backing up a truck full of hard drives to a customers datacenter would be the fastest way to import X PB of data. It's probably loading from a tape silo and spent 18 months at the customer site.
> even relatively remote locations become "accessible" for 100 Gbps+ fiber or microwave connectivity, and _very_ remote locations for tens of Gbps.
I’m guessing:
1. You’ve never priced out said circuits before
2. Never seen the lead times and minimum contract periods on them
3. Don’t realize in general how hard it is to actually max out circuits like that.
Shipping / freight company is generally still a preferred solution to moving very very large amounts of data even in 2020. Your own employer still ships large datasets that way too. Here’s a link from 2007:
Pretty good idea on #3 (and for much much much larger links), and a decent idea for #1.
If I had 1-10 PB to move I could totally see most people using FedEx to ship JBODs around. For small transfers it makes sense, and we also have a product for this. Internally I'd use our WAN for those, which is where this now starts to make sense: Amazon does not have anywhere near the global WAN capacity that we do, nor so far have they had a good reason to have that capacity.
If you've got the global capacity to allow a customer to peer to your nearest location (and your nearest location likely isn't too far away for most of the world), fiber makes sense for large (~EB-scale, which I assume anyone with 100PB+ is well on their way to 1EB+) amounts of data. We have a product for these peerings (primarily for customers in colos): https://cloud.google.com/interconnect/docs/concepts/dedicate...
Also, if you want to know an extreme edge case that can't (currently) be done any other way, consider the astronomical observatories at the South Pole.
For the south pole, they use C-130s, and not standard shipping containers. You can see the little ones that they use in the photo at the bottom of https://www.nsf.gov/geo/opp/support/lc130.jsp
Right, but Snowmobile is packaged as a shipping container because it has a small datacenter inside, so unless you can fit the assembled 45ft container in the plane, I don't think this works?
The real reason Snowmobile exists: to knock out potential opposition to large-scale migration from on-prem data centers into AWS.
Most of the intro decisions around moving to the cloud happen before Amazon is ever involved in the sales cycle. There are some managerial accountants and IT people getting involved to evaluate options in a process called "Evaluation of Alternatives." At some point, Amazon probably started hearing that the IT people were saying "we can't possibly move all of that data to the cloud, it would swamp our network or take five years just to finish the network transfer."
Enter Snowmobile, which cuts that conversation thread off at the knees. Amazon can go to a Fortune 100 company that is evaluating a move and honestly claim that they are prepared to move exabytes of data, physically, into the cloud. And it's not some premium feature that they're going to get charged bajillions for, it's a stock feature of AWS. (Even if it costs a lot of money)
Snowmobile isn't targeted at the average customer, it's targeted specifically at the accountants, IT architects, and management consultants evaluating the decision to move all of Fortune 100 Company X from on-prem data centers into 100% AWS. One extra hug from Amazon to let the most risk-averse person know that they have it covered, and would they please go ahead and write their 9-figure check to AWS.
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.
I wonder if this is related to Amazons Project Kuiper satellite broadband constellation, would make sense for them to be building out their ground station capabilities.
I thought this was an April fools joke once I clicked on the link. The bandwidth they are operation on (54 MHz) is ridiculous though! Truly sci-fi-ish stuff going on here. Also, did Amazon build this from scratch or did they acquire a company that had the basic infra for this kind of stuff?
I'm a person who knows nothing about these things, and my quick googling didn't help me - how "fast" is 54MHz wide uplink? Can it be measured in internet network speeds, or in what kind of way can I compare the speed of it?
I was curious bout this as well. Do people get 500 Mhz allocations? Or are there no allocations because things are directional? I think they support a 500Mhz wide downlink?
Talk by Tom Soderstrom[1] of JPL on this from December 19. They announced a partnership last year for various things, including downlink of high definition video from the ISS. [2]
Having just finished reading this story https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22718330 the author might want to check out setting up several AWS ground stations. I suspect the cost could be out-of-this-world.
A bit of a tangent, but how feasible is it for Starlink to crowdsource their ground stations? Let people contribute to the constellation by putting up antennas on top of their fiber connections (perhaps via solar roofs).
I think hard thing about Spacex is gonna be all the legalities across the planet of establishing an ISP. In some places it's demonopolised, but in some seems it might require to put up their own network.
I'm getting jealous. After a career on the software side of communications (r&d in ble and 4g) I left for the healthcare industry for many reasons but mainly driven by the fact the projects were so monotone. Had I been able to apply to work for a project like this, I surely would have enjoyed staying around longer.
183 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 207 ms ] threadCould this be used to monitor someone's home?
Thanks to Trump's inability to not tweet anything he sees, we know that Block 4 KH-11 satellites have a 10cm/pixel about standard (they're in an elliptical orbit, but they use which ever is closest at the time). So we're looking at a 10M/pixel in geostationary orbit, assuming you can get the same optics that NROL was shipping up as late as 2013.
If there’s one thing I hate about that guy, it’s his being the most transparent presidency in history.
https://www.democracynow.org/2020/2/6/national_archives_reco...
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/06/10/trump-papers-filin...
It'd be a huge stretch to call it "the most transparent presidency in history".
What did he leak? From what I can tell, the photo merely confirmed what was already a reasonable educated guess.
A 1968 NASA publication (sold for $3.00) discusses various limitations, concluding: "The telescope objective for best resolution, as viewed from a satellite at an altitude of 320 kilometers, requires a diameter of about 1.6 meters to resolve a 12-centimeter radius" https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/196900...
That approximately 10 cm resolution has always been a resonable guess of the capabilities of best spy satellites. Trump's tweet surprised no-one. It confirmed what has always been thought to be true.
High end capacitors over batteries, and a swarm where individual drones come home to charge, keeping roughly 1/3-1/2 in reserve and accounting for flight times to/from target area...
For less coverage, of course, less drones would be needed. Getting down closer to the size between a large bug and small bird's body for total size would probably be needed as well for a bit of stealth... noise is another concern. Interesting work/ideas.
(With more satellites you can get more frequent coverage of course.)
Radar of course is weatherproof but again the cost is ridiculous unless you are a government or Exxon.
But yes, absolutely.
This is not true for all satellites, obviously. There are private ones that use encrypted communications, but weather satellites can be easily used if you have the proper antenna and equipment setup to do so.
Does anyone know how to get a NORAD ID?
"You can connect with any satellite in low Earth orbit (LEO) and medium Earth orbit (MEO) operating in X-band and S-band frequencies, including: S-band uplink and downlink, X-band narrowband and wideband downlink."
[1] https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/products/verge.html
No to 24/7 monitoring for quite a long while - need a really large constellation for that (think Starlink/OneWeb scale).
- space-qualification for the satellite control software. You need to test your own flight software in space, so you use our satellite platform to run test/validation and then reuse on your own satellite.
- space-based algorithm tests, such as data compression/error correction or radiation hardening through software means. Inter-satellite link protocols is also a rich field for software developers.
- data analysis: satellite instruments can produce a lot more data than can be downlinked, so it is in your best interest to pre-process it as much as possible on-board instead of downloading just raw data
- Autonomy algorithms tests: for example for automatic collision avoidance software or maneuvres around non-cooperating target (think defunct satellite or asteroid)
- Data fusion: combine data from multiple satellite instruments, such AIS receiver and imagery to filter maritime traffic for ships without AIS transponders on, then classify those
- Remote asset tracking and labeling (think pipelines, agriculture, shipping containers, farming plots) where you don't have "eyes on the ground". Needs some image recognition tools to identify changes and/or damage.
All of the above can be packed as an "app" and run concurrently or in series on one or multiple satellites, with the possibility of reusing the code for different satellite platforms.
An interesting case is making a single "virtual satellite" out of multiple physical ones, with a single app using instruments from different satellites.
Will you be able to 'geofence' your code? Yes, absolutely!
https://blog.exodusorbitals.com/nova-a-crowd-flyable-satelli...
Will you have some super hypervisor software, which can take over and recover from the consequences of any bugs in the software under test?
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.
What’s the target customer profile of this service exactly?
What's the threat model for a ground station? Interception? Sabotage? Hardware theft? Can you even sell these things on eBay?
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Midnight_broadcast_sig...
Not to mention just plain destruction of bringing down a 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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.hetzne...
2: https://web.archive.org/web/20050507034045/http://www.hetzne...
Nope, this was actually announced [0] about 18 months ago.
---
[0]: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-ground-station-ingest-a...
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. (...)
(Ended up doing it from university, where I had symmetric 100mbit in my dorm room).
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/send-us-that-data/
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/databox/
(I work at Google, don't work on that product.)
You'll get supplied (at least) two SSDs.
With instructions for how to use in both Windows and Linux.
Unfortunately even though it was "GA", it appears that they never really actually tested using it in Linux.
I submitted (and they were merged) a number of documentation bugfixes related to Linux.
Two firmware updates later, one bricked disk, one which failed to verify the copied data -- and 9 months of time all down the drain.
This reason is why I will never use Azure. It wasn't the bugs and device failures that was the problem. Just the sheer work in having to teach Azures' support staff about their own product (after fighting to get them to record the support case -- you normally can't raise one if you don't pay).
Why did I pick Azure for this?
Because (at the time) both GCP and AWS catered for 100Gb+ volumes. And we were (and remain) around 50Gb.
I haven't re-evaluated to see if either GCP or AWS have better options now.
In particular if you have ~100PB of data to move and you are in a location that can be reached by a 45-foot long shipping container on a truck with access to the ~350KW of power it takes to run Snowmobile, you're clearly not somewhere _completely_ inaccessible. Given that 100PB of data will cost you $400k/mo in storage costs on AWS Glacier (before the discounts that you'll obviously negotiate for), even relatively remote locations become "accessible" for 100 Gbps+ fiber or microwave connectivity, and _very_ remote locations for tens of Gbps. The Snowmobile itself is only 1 Tb/s, so if you think you're going to save time this work, consider how long it takes to move it to you and then move it to an AWS facility versus the time it takes to fill it.
I don't get where this is the right call for _any_ customers, even as a one-off. I'd love it if someone from AWS could tell me where my math is off on this.
Say I have datacentre in london, Sure I could plumb in 4 100gig lines. But they are typically on a year lease and have a long lead time.
Plus, once its on the datatruck its AWS's problem.
Snowmobile was built because a pre-sales engineer sarcastically said backing up a truck full of hard drives to a customers datacenter would be the fastest way to import X PB of data. It's probably loading from a tape silo and spent 18 months at the customer site.
I’m guessing:
1. You’ve never priced out said circuits before
2. Never seen the lead times and minimum contract periods on them
3. Don’t realize in general how hard it is to actually max out circuits like that.
Shipping / freight company is generally still a preferred solution to moving very very large amounts of data even in 2020. Your own employer still ships large datasets that way too. Here’s a link from 2007:
https://royal.pingdom.com/fedex-still-faster-than-the-intern...
But from contacts I know inside Google, it’s still done regularly.
If I had 1-10 PB to move I could totally see most people using FedEx to ship JBODs around. For small transfers it makes sense, and we also have a product for this. Internally I'd use our WAN for those, which is where this now starts to make sense: Amazon does not have anywhere near the global WAN capacity that we do, nor so far have they had a good reason to have that capacity.
If you've got the global capacity to allow a customer to peer to your nearest location (and your nearest location likely isn't too far away for most of the world), fiber makes sense for large (~EB-scale, which I assume anyone with 100PB+ is well on their way to 1EB+) amounts of data. We have a product for these peerings (primarily for customers in colos): https://cloud.google.com/interconnect/docs/concepts/dedicate...
Also, when I go to: https://www.infrastructure.aws/
(annoyingly I can't link to the network) it says 100Gbps of WAN capacity around the AWS global network.
I did a quick search and wasn't able to find what it is for GCP -- do you have a link handy?
https://cloud.google.com/transfer-appliance
Also, if you want to know an extreme edge case that can't (currently) be done any other way, consider the astronomical observatories at the South Pole.
Antarctica was the only place that came to mind, but I wasn't sure about the costs of getting a shipping container in / out.
Those are big fucking planes, so maybe you can?
Most of the intro decisions around moving to the cloud happen before Amazon is ever involved in the sales cycle. There are some managerial accountants and IT people getting involved to evaluate options in a process called "Evaluation of Alternatives." At some point, Amazon probably started hearing that the IT people were saying "we can't possibly move all of that data to the cloud, it would swamp our network or take five years just to finish the network transfer."
Enter Snowmobile, which cuts that conversation thread off at the knees. Amazon can go to a Fortune 100 company that is evaluating a move and honestly claim that they are prepared to move exabytes of data, physically, into the cloud. And it's not some premium feature that they're going to get charged bajillions for, it's a stock feature of AWS. (Even if it costs a lot of money)
Snowmobile isn't targeted at the average customer, it's targeted specifically at the accountants, IT architects, and management consultants evaluating the decision to move all of Fortune 100 Company X from on-prem data centers into 100% AWS. One extra hug from Amazon to let the most risk-averse person know that they have it covered, and would they please go ahead and write their 9-figure check to AWS.
[1] https://spacenews.com/amazon-lockheed-venture-casts-shadow-o...
1. Tom is part of the office of information technology office at JPL 2. https://www.geekwire.com/2019/amazon-web-services-nasa-team-...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18546272
I think hard thing about Spacex is gonna be all the legalities across the planet of establishing an ISP. In some places it's demonopolised, but in some seems it might require to put up their own network.