<story><title>AWS Ground Station – Ingest and Process Data from Orbiting Satellites</title><url>https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-ground-station-ingest-and-process-data-from-orbiting-satellites/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>patrickyeon</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m... not convinced this is a decent offering. At the same time, I&amp;#x27;m repeatedly wrong with this whole cloud computing, so maybe I&amp;#x27;m just that person stuck with the old ways and telling everyone else they&amp;#x27;re doing it wrong.&lt;p&gt;But it seems like a recipe that combines so many of the worst parts of running a groundstation. The setup can&amp;#x27;t easily be specialized enough to really milk capability (say, different ways to correct pointing and orbit determination errors that need more direct control of the antenna than just feeding a TLE), but it&amp;#x27;s likely so general that there&amp;#x27;s still significant engineering effort for anybody who wants to use it. If you want to do anything requiring round-trips to the satellite, where you need to ship raw radio signals to a DC, process them in software to demodulate and decode, then encode and modulate your responce before shipping it back as raw radio signals to the groundstation, sorry but that latency is painful and hurts you on link utilization.&lt;p&gt;In comparison, buying a small turn-key dish and operating it is not that bad. Paying per-minute or per-pass gets really expensive for smallsat&amp;#x2F;cubesat operators, at least at the usual prices I&amp;#x27;ve seen and compared to the operating cost of equipment you own. Also, if you&amp;#x27;re just running a tech demo then it&amp;#x27;s not exactly prohibitive to partner with somebody who has excess capacity.&lt;p&gt;I think this offering is missing the mark. If I had to make an analogy, I&amp;#x27;d say they&amp;#x27;re offering roughly &amp;quot;GCP for downlink&amp;quot; to a world that&amp;#x27;s not quite homogeneous enough for it to make sense. If I were trying to do this, I&amp;#x27;d be aiming to be the &amp;quot;Squarespace of downlink&amp;quot; (more tightly scoped capabilities, but much better performance and more turn-key) or someone delivering groundstation-in-a-box kits.&lt;p&gt;Context: I used to work at Planet Labs, having spent considerable time collaborating with the groundstations team, as well as some collaboration with the missions ops team.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>TheAceOfHearts</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t know anything about this field, so I&amp;#x27;m hoping I could bug you with some questions because it seems really fascinating!&lt;p&gt;First of all, could you give some concrete examples of the kinds of data people using this would be handling? The examples provided in the article are incredibly vague, and the linked Wikipedia articles didn&amp;#x27;t help clarify.&lt;p&gt;Could you give some ballpark numbers and breakdown of the costs involved? How much does it cost to manufacture and launch a small satellite? What about buying a dish and operating your own ground station? What about regulatory fees for licensing and registration? There&amp;#x27;s a few mentions of hobbyists, but I have a hard time imagining many people with enough money and interest to deal with all these challenges. Is there some secret cabal of millionaires and billionaires that are really into space?</text></comment>
<story><title>AWS Ground Station – Ingest and Process Data from Orbiting Satellites</title><url>https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-ground-station-ingest-and-process-data-from-orbiting-satellites/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>patrickyeon</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m... not convinced this is a decent offering. At the same time, I&amp;#x27;m repeatedly wrong with this whole cloud computing, so maybe I&amp;#x27;m just that person stuck with the old ways and telling everyone else they&amp;#x27;re doing it wrong.&lt;p&gt;But it seems like a recipe that combines so many of the worst parts of running a groundstation. The setup can&amp;#x27;t easily be specialized enough to really milk capability (say, different ways to correct pointing and orbit determination errors that need more direct control of the antenna than just feeding a TLE), but it&amp;#x27;s likely so general that there&amp;#x27;s still significant engineering effort for anybody who wants to use it. If you want to do anything requiring round-trips to the satellite, where you need to ship raw radio signals to a DC, process them in software to demodulate and decode, then encode and modulate your responce before shipping it back as raw radio signals to the groundstation, sorry but that latency is painful and hurts you on link utilization.&lt;p&gt;In comparison, buying a small turn-key dish and operating it is not that bad. Paying per-minute or per-pass gets really expensive for smallsat&amp;#x2F;cubesat operators, at least at the usual prices I&amp;#x27;ve seen and compared to the operating cost of equipment you own. Also, if you&amp;#x27;re just running a tech demo then it&amp;#x27;s not exactly prohibitive to partner with somebody who has excess capacity.&lt;p&gt;I think this offering is missing the mark. If I had to make an analogy, I&amp;#x27;d say they&amp;#x27;re offering roughly &amp;quot;GCP for downlink&amp;quot; to a world that&amp;#x27;s not quite homogeneous enough for it to make sense. If I were trying to do this, I&amp;#x27;d be aiming to be the &amp;quot;Squarespace of downlink&amp;quot; (more tightly scoped capabilities, but much better performance and more turn-key) or someone delivering groundstation-in-a-box kits.&lt;p&gt;Context: I used to work at Planet Labs, having spent considerable time collaborating with the groundstations team, as well as some collaboration with the missions ops team.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>matchagaucho</author><text>Looks like AWS announced this capability to beef up their DoD JEDI contract position.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;&amp;quot;Give us $10B to build your datacenter, and we&amp;#x27;ll throw in a ground station for free!&amp;quot;&lt;/i&gt;</text></comment>