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Comment by davidstoker | Hacker News Reader

Very cool! Now if only I had a satellite to use it with...

How much demand would there be for this type of offering?

I guess the idea is that if the connection weren't encrypted you could listen to anything out there (like satellites used for transmitting weather information to ships at sea).

There is a fairly narrow cone you would need to be in to intercept the data but if its intelligence related then it’s definitely encrypted thanks to export laws. ITAR and EAR https://www.bis.doc.gov/index.php/policy-guidance/encryption

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.

Of intelligence data there is. Read up on ITAR and EAR. So you don’t think that the satellites AWS will interface with will be facing earth with sensors?

I’ve worked in an ITAR industry. This topic isn’t about intelligence data :)

Agree, I also worked under ITAR restrictions in the launch industry.

ITAR is pretty limited in what it considers intelligence/military. Unless you're looking for missile launches or doing remote sensing with technologies that are better than what's available to the general public, it probably won't apply. There's plenty of interesting things you can do without running afoul of ITAR/USML definitions.

Some telemetry and sensor data may be EAR99, which is as far as export restrictions go is about as nonrestrictive as it gets. For example iTunes is EAR99— that's why the EULA says you're not allowed to use it to develop nuclear or biological weapons.

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)

That’s because they’re telescopes. NASA’s telescopes are basically spy satellites pointed outwards.

it's also true for the xray/gamma ray/etc... observatories

> 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...

> The NRA

NRO damnit

Some might be encrypted, but I don't think they are all encrypted:

https://www.rtl-sdr.com/rtl-sdr-tutorial-receiving-noaa-weat...

Usually the export laws and restrictions (ITAR) refer to the technology used to launch the satellites, not the data they downlink.

But if you had the key, you could also use encrypted satellite data.

(Edit note: the parent changed their text to say intelligence data, which is obviously not what I was talking about)

Pretty sure NOAA also regulates the use and encryption of the data collected. Also the keys are typically in an HSM with lots of security protocol and air gap, so good luck with that.

NOAA scans the earth like a big scanner and sends the data down for anyone to pick up and get an image of the globe. It's not encrypted.

NOAA has (though it may have changed recently) had regulatory control over some types of data collection, such as for any imaging data captured, and indeed had requirements on encryption, both on the link later and even on disk and data encryption for groundstation sites not owned by the operator. It's not a standardized specification for how things are encrypted and it doesn't apply to all data, but there is a process.

The ITAR laws can also refer to data. A lot of the data coming from the ITAR restricted technology is also ITAR controlled because in theory you can inference something about how it works based on the data that is coming from it. This is typically true of data coming from spacecraft payloads or new technology.

Encryption is still not necessarily required, unless you are landing the signal only on a groundstation in the United States.

AWS can handle ITAR controlled data though. They already have the AWS GovCloud for data subjet to ITAR restrictions.

Yes, ITAR also relates to plans, schematics, software, data, all sorts of things. If anything, the ITAR language itself is very vague.

But usually the science type or payload data is one thing, and then the lower level hardware telemetry is done in a different way.

I've used GovCloud to store ITAR data. It's cool. If you encrypt your ITAR data, you can also store it in a public cloud like S3, but just for storage, you shouldn't decrypt it there or have the keys there.

Source: I worked on the telemetry team at SpaceX.

I could imagine companies like Planet using this for more points of presence. You only get tiny windows of time to download bits from satellites to ground stations and you have limited storage capacity. Additional ground sites could really help companies get more data out of fewer craft.

> Now if only I had a satellite to use it with...

I wonder if this would work with Blockstream Satellite: https://blockstream.com/satellite/

(Of course using a remote ground station operated by someone else completely defeats the purpose of Blockstream Satellite, but it would be a fun "hello world" for AWS Ground Station, if it were self-serve)

Nearly all satellites up there are basically spectrum for rent. You can call a satellite operator and get a quote for bandwidth per region.

I don't know, but this service seems like it will facilitate & stimulate development of that market.

I'm sure AWS will be offering satellite VMs soon enough

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