Satellite maps? An Italian-Swedish company downloads them in real time
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Clint E. Crosier intimidates you from the first moment, starting with the handshake. He was a former United States Air Force general, served as director of space force planning in the Office of the Chief of Space Operations. When he looks you straight in the eye he is martial but courteous. Even now that he hasn’t been wearing a uniform for a couple of years, he’s gone private, becoming director of aerospace and satellite solutions at Amazon web services. «We are forming multidisciplinary and international teams, which have the right skills to face all the challenges, let’s say that we are ready and prepared to bring cloud computing to Space». Which he basically means to make the processing capacity and technologies of AWS available to SpaceX, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic and to all the subjects of the space economy.
The meeting with the Italian press
In a meeting reserved for the Italian press at re: Invent, the event that took place from November 28 to December 2, 2022 in Las Vegas, he answered questions by explaining that the space industry is different from the others. «When you’re up there, when you’ve launched a satellite everything has to work, for a long time and with little energy. Sometimes there’s just no way to update the software or fix something online.” In the growing business of satellite maps, for example, the problem has always been that of “download” costs. The images can be downloaded whenever you want and above all you have no way of understanding which ones are useful and which ones are not. Providing AWS edge capabilities aboard an orbiting satellite allows customers to automatically analyze in-orbit satellite imagery data and downlink only the most useful imagery for archiving .
The pilot experiment
At the state of the art, only one experiment was carried out, unique in its kind, by AWS which brought real-time computing capacity to an orbiting satellite. The operation was conducted on the satellite of the Italian D-Orbit with the collaboration of the Swedish Unibap. A “downlink,” the process of transferring data from orbit, requires a spacecraft to connect to a ground station. AWS’ software automatically reviewed the images to decide which ones were most useful to send to the ground.
The projects
But the “spatial” ambitions of Amazon’s cloud division don’t stop at satellite. The mission, the major general explained to us, is to “innovate” the whole chain of the space industry. It means taking computing into orbit. But also bring the power of the big digital platforms over our heads. Big tech’s colonization of the sky has begun.
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