AWS Ground Station | Hacker News Reader

AWS Ground Station

aws.amazon.com

358 pointsleoh176 comments

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.

>maybe ask them to beef up their security

What's the threat model for a ground station? Interception? Sabotage? Hardware theft? Can you even sell these things on eBay?

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.

I would expect ground stations that important to be on military bases, not random locations that a private company is scouting. No?

A ground station can also point at things it's not supposed to:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Midnight_broadcast_sig...

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.

Running your own flock is far from the norm. The target is likely the media/broadcast industry.

I came to say this. Some folks just have intermittant needs. I want to a remote hookup for Z minutes at x time from y sat.

I would say "it depends", when it comes to cost. You can build your own grown station for UHF/VHF bands at under $1000.

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.

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.

Yes, I agree. Comes with probably the same caveats as all other Amazon services.

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.

> AWS eliminated all capex expenditures

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...

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.

Why are they so expensive? German electricity is ~2x as expensive as the cheaper US regions.

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.

They use consumer hardware, that's why they are so cheap.

> ... I wasn't sure for a moment whether this was just an early caught April Fools.

Nope, this was actually announced [0] about 18 months ago.

---

[0]: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-ground-station-ingest-a...

They do have some impressive "I didn't know anyone would need that!" services. I also love this one:

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. (...)

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).

That's what the snowballs are for.

Without a doubt.

They also have a service where you can ship them a USB hard drive.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/send-us-that-data/

This is my view of Renaissance if Internet cafés!

Now I'm staring at my kitchen table visualizing a 100^3 pile of 1TB hard drives.

The announcement for this at re:Invent was them literally driving an 18-wheeler onto the stage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vQmTZTq7nw

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

Microsoft has a similar service called Databox, wouldn't be surprised if GCS has something like this as well

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/databox/

GCP Transfer Appliance: https://cloud.google.com/transfer-appliance

(I work at Google, don't work on that product.)

I actually used this personally (Jan 2019)

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.

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

its about timing.

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.

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.

No, it was built because a solutions architect sat next to a film producer on a plane and talked about how to solve for his unique needs.

Miles, I can't tell if you're messing with me or just stating what actually happened :)

Obligatory XKCD https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/

> 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:

https://royal.pingdom.com/fedex-still-faster-than-the-intern...

But from contacts I know inside Google, it’s still done regularly.

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...

That product looks exactly like AWS Direct Connect

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?

I guess you didn't notice that Google Cloud has a thing that competes with Snowball?

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.

I said Snowmobile doesn't make sense. Snowball makes total sense. The economics are entirely different.

Antarctica was the only place that came to mind, but I wasn't sure about the costs of getting a shipping container in / out.

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?

Those are big fucking planes, so maybe you can?

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.

pretty sure it's been there for years.

I believe it was announced in November 2018.

We also can offer you an actual satellite for rent, starting 2021. Have a look at https://www.exodusorbitals.com

SaaS? Satellite as a Service?

Yes, more or less.

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?

Yes for cameras.

No to 24/7 monitoring for quite a long while - need a really large constellation for that (think Starlink/OneWeb scale).

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?

Is "3U" the satellite's dimensions as if it's electronic rack equipment? hah.

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?

You do "git commit" and we will deploy your code on our satellite, that's it. Similar to Heroku model.

Sorry, but what would be the use case for running code on a satellite?

A few solid cases are:

- 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?

Yeah, good point :)

How big is the fleet? Can i 'geofence' my code so that it only runs when over a certain part of the planet?

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.

We plan to run a Kickstarter for that exactly :) Keep in touch with us on our mailing list:

https://blog.exodusorbitals.com/nova-a-crowd-flyable-satelli...

> Autonomy algorithms tests: for example for automatic collision avoidance software

Will you have some super hypervisor software, which can take over and recover from the consequences of any bugs in the software under test?

Yes

If you are interested in an open satellite ground-station network, with 330+ ground-station you may want to check out SatNOGS. https://satnogs.org

The SatNOGS Network (https//network.satnogs.org) collects data from hundreds of satellites through hundreds of stations globally. More details on the satellites we monitor are on our satellite database(https://db.satnogs.org). In some cases we are able to visualize the teremetry data on our grafana dashboards(https://dashboard.satnogs.org)

If you are interested in participating on our community, want info to build you own ground-station or get your own equipment on-line don't hesitate to check our wiki(https://wiki.satnogs.org)

disclaimer: I'm a member of the board of Libre Space Foundation(https://libre.space) the non-profit organization developing and operating SatNOGS.

That was my first thought, "oh, it's a commercial satnogs".

Which I suppose proves it's a good idea. :)

Amazon has a habit to make it's internal tools into AWS services (while still using them internally). I think it shows a tip of some space-related works inside.

to my knowledge, amazon had done a lot of satellite image processing for certain three letter agencies. this is probably related to that more than anything.

While this may well be true... more likely it's part of their logistics monitoring.

That would not be done on Ground Station, at least in standard regions. Once you hit that level, you are into at least the Gov region.

That being said, those agencies already have huge ground stations at their disposal run by NASA and other "groups". They don't need this service, they would ingest them over NIPRNet or SIPRNet directly into AWS Gov or AWS Gov Secret for processing.

Unfortunately looks like this is not available to almost anyone except in rare cases: "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’d have both those pieces of information handily available if you had satellites in space. If you don’t have satellites in space, not target customer?

Thank god I now have an easy way to communicate with all my satellites.

You joke. But maybe you’ve never considered what satellite data applications you could have written because it wasn’t easy to do in the past?

True enough for me at least. But now that I have thought about it, I yet remain of GPs opinion.

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?

What's so weird about 54mhz? It's very close to the somewhat commonly used 6 meter band by hams

Bandwidth and frequency are very different. They have a 54MHz wide uplink, at whichever of the supported bands you want.

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?

It depends on the SNR. You can assume that almost all satellite connections use between 0.2 and 3 bit/s/Hz. It's likely closer to 1 bit/s/Hz though.

So operating with 54MHz of bandwidth would result in a transfer rate of somewhere on the order of 54 Mbps?

Many cable channels are using DVB-S2 8PSK at 5/6 rate. That would be 110 Mbps in 54 MHz (45 Msyms/s).

Not really, that's the bandwidth of an average mid-end SDR like LimeSDR(300$) or BladeRF(500$)

I have never heard of a LimeSDR putting out a 54Mhz wide signal for broadcast. Can you describe how you are configuring things?

Haven't worked with LimeSDR myself, but here's the paper that suggests that it's possible https://upcommons.upc.edu/bitstream/handle/2117/119623/memor...

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?

Lockheed is building out the ground infrastructure network [1]

[1] https://spacenews.com/amazon-lockheed-venture-casts-shadow-o...

The satellite ground station market is quite dynamic at the moment. As the data generated on-orbit continues to grow, the need for robust ground infrastructure becomes that much more important.

Ground-Station-as-a-Service (GSaaS) is something that AWS stepped into given the fact that AWS is used quite extensively for the data processing chain, so it was a logical play for them to verticalize. AWS partnered with Lockheed to build out the hardware network [1][2].

They've got some decent competition in the market. We published a round-up article of ground station providers a while back [3].

The move to higher frequencies is changing the market substantially. This year, a number of optical ground stations were supposed to be deployed, given growth of satellite terminals [4]. We'll have to see with the virus what actually ends up happening.

[1] https://spacenews.com/amazon-lockheed-venture-casts-shadow-o...

[2] https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/products/verge.html

[3] https://blog.satsearch.co/2019-09-25-ground-station-service-...

[4] https://blog.satsearch.co/2020-01-22-optical-communications-...

Edit: Added/updated references

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]

1. Tom is part of the office of information technology office at JPL 2. https://www.geekwire.com/2019/amazon-web-services-nasa-team-...

> 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.

Does anyone know how to get a NORAD ID?

Launch a satellite, obviously. But you can look up existing ones at http://celestrak.com

You get one for free if you launch a satellite.

They typically do walk-ins. Just look for the big metal door.

https://www.nesdis.noaa.gov/CRSRA/generalFAQ.html

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.

Probably more likely an offshoot or requirement from Blue Origin.

More likely Kuiper.

Wasn't this announced last year?

Yes it was: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-ground-station-ready-to...

Or you could use something like Satnogs.org ;)

Thank you.

> You can use radar satellite imagery of your various business facilities such as parking lots, logistic centers, and retail stores

Could this be used to monitor someone's home?

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.

> Thanks to Trump's inability to not tweet anything he sees

If there’s one thing I hate about that guy, it’s his being the most transparent presidency in history.

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).

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".

> On one hand leaking information that's only useful to geopolitical adversaries

What did he leak? From what I can tell, the photo merely confirmed what was already a reasonable educated guess.

The resolution of the optics.

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.

How about equipping every Starlink satelite with some optics?

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.

This is a "bring-your-own-satellite" service.

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.

Could this be used for downlink only? For example, to pull down NOAA satellite data?

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.

I’m 100% sure. You can’t beat free.

Well, not quite free. Still gotta buy the wire, other supporting antenna hardware, and RTL-SDR lol

But yes, absolutely.

Wait, shouldn't there be some sort of authentication step? The only barrier to communicating with satellites is the equipment?!

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.

Sure, SDR is the easy answer if you’re within LOS. But let’s assume I wanted to listen to another geosynchronous satellite that I wasn’t in LOS of.

Kindel's 3rd Law[1] – Amazon will enter every existing business, channel, and market. If said business, channel, or market doesn’t already exist, Amazon will try to invent it.

[1] https://ceklog.kindel.com/2020/03/30/kindels-3rd-law/

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.

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.

Used to work at a startup aiming to create a similar type of network. AWS joining was refreshing for validating the market and providing a big target to work against.

AWS / Lockheed made a good call with phased array antennas (SpaceX too on the satellite side). Can't scale to many different users if your ground stations can only serve one satellite at a time, similar for a satellite providing internet. I suspect there might still be challenges getting enough gain for high bandwidth, but I'm sure it'll improve with better tech. A dish is just physically stuck pointing at one angle.

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?

i mean we have been getting porn from space since like the 80's right?

Truly miraculous!

Sort of. This service launched May 2019.

So where’s the free tier?

Previously discussed on HN (Nov 27, 2018):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18546272

It's easy to miss the data processing and storage story. It potentially sounds like a fascinating story of vertically integrating to make your processing, cloud storage, data management (of huge amounts of data) more attractive compared to competition. Also the companies/organizations that this will be interesting to (think defence) are likely to have large overall budget for other cloud services. Well played Amazon!

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 recall looking at this a while ago, but I couldn't seem to find what kind of RF hardware amazon is using, is there any information on that?

I don't think AWS are involved in the satellites themselves, they are simply making access to ground station equipment available over the net.

Mmm, I'm curious about what transmitter/receiver/antenna, they're using on the ground.

Per the Details page:

"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

It's leveraging Lockheed technology [1].

[1] https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/products/verge.html

Thanks a lot! Will give that a watch.

I think this is the real SaaS (Satellite as a Service ) o.O

and next service come as a FaaS (Fusion Reactor as a Service), you can produce your own power and pay as you use it =D

Use it with this? https://agi.com/satellite-ar

what i'd use it for: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/05/stock-v...

Where does one get the satellite to rent?

Here to help! Sign up a contract with us, and we'll give you a satellite to rent.

who are you?

We are https://www.exodusorbitals.com

maybe add it to you profile. thank you.

Can it run Minecraft?

Well, yes...

There’s dozens of them up there. You rent time and bandwidth on a telecom satellite.

Someone like Intelsat? (You don't generally rent a whole satellite. You pay by the second for tiny pieces of the spectrum.)

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.

Aren't such shots form orbit already available from various commercial satellites? Likely they are already used.

Thought they’ve been doing this for a while?

Probably the only costumer is Elon Musk

previously on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20991730

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