Hacker News Reader

Comment by chakspak | Hacker News Reader

Holy wow, it never occurred to me that there were enough organizations launching satellites to warrant creating a managed service to support it.

View on HN

There isn't. This is some VP's pet project .

There's a lot of those around. For a sample, look at everything with "Deep" in its name (like AWS DeepCompose, DeepLens, and DeepRacer).

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)

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com