We often hear about how space explorations not only enable us to broaden our understanding of the universe but also inspire innovations that improve our lives on Earth. Some of these innovations include artificial limbs, memory foam and portable computers.
Interestingly, today’s space industry is exploring the use of business technologies — especially cloud infrastructure and cloud-based solutions — to reduce the cost of gathering data and accelerate time to insights, among many other use cases.
To help space companies maximise the benefits of the cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS) established an aerospace and satellite business unit in 2020. Leading the team is retired Air Force Major General Clint Crosier, who has a broad charge of experience in space operations. Before joining AWS, he was the lead planner and architect of the US Space Force arm of the US military.
Crosier shares with DigitalEdge how his team works with commercial and government space customers globally to provide tailored, secure and cost-effective cloud solutions to help them solve their toughest challenges and reimagine space exploration.
Could you share your observations on the space industry in Asia Pacific (Apac)?
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There are a lot of activities happening in Apac’s space industry and I’m excited about its growth. South Korea, for instance, successfully launched satellites into orbit with its homegrown Nuri rocket last June.
Meanwhile, Singapore’s Office for Space Technology and Industry (OSTIn) has signed a statement of cooperation and intent with AWS to develop local space capabilities. OSTin recognises that when a space economy develops within a country, it creates additional economic and investment opportunities.
As part of the partnership, we held several workshops for space start-ups in Singapore last year. One of the local start-ups we’re supporting is EOfactory, which provides an earth observation insights platform. Using AWS’s cloud-based capabilities to analyse satellite-based imagery, EOfactory offers insights that can help with climate management, city planning, maritime shipping, security, and more.
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In short, many activities are happening within the government space agencies, commercial space sector and space startups community in Singapore and the region — and we’re supporting them in various ways.
Where are space companies in their cloud journey?
Before joining AWS, I spent 33 years flying satellites and launching rockets in the US Air Force and the US Space Force. If you had asked me how the cloud was applicable to the space industry back then, I would have said I don’t really know. And that was the state of the space industry three years ago — it was just starting to learn how to leverage the cloud, and that’s why AWS set up a team to focus on the space industry.
Things have changed since then. Today, space companies are trying to get on my team’s calendars — instead of us having to set up meetings with them — as they recognise that there are certain things that they can only achieve with the power of the cloud. We’re getting to the point where we’re collecting so much data that the only way to make sense of that information in a cost-effective and timely manner is by leveraging technologies like artificial intelligence on the cloud.
What are the space industry’s top challenges that led to cloud adoption? Is reducing costs the primary motivator, similar to other sectors?
The basic premise of the cloud is don’t invest millions and millions of dollars to build your own data centres and processing capability that you might not use all the time but you have to maintain and sustain them. Instead, use AWS so you can use more of your investment for your specific mission, regardless of the industry you’re in.
So, my team helps space companies with that. By leveraging the team’s hundreds of years of combined experience flying satellites, launching rockets, and operating ground stations, we can sit down with customers and identify specific places in the space mission that require cloud-based capability.
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For example, Singapore-based Kacific Broadband Satellites recognised the value of the cloud and decided to go all-in on AWS Cloud. We, therefore, virtualised its network and moved its IT infrastructure and critical business applications to the cloud.
This has enabled Kacific to reduce time-to-market, enhance network management by approximately 50%, and respond more rapidly to customer requests. Such case studies show that moving to the cloud can help improve efficiency and reduce costs, allowing a company to continue growing.
AWS Ground Station is one of your key offerings for the space industry. Please tell us more about it.
Launched in 2018, AWS Ground Station is the first in the industry, so we like to think that we lead the way in terms of cloud-based ground station capability.
Similar to the value propositions of the cloud, AWS Ground Station enables space companies to no longer worry about buying, leasing, building, scaling, or managing their own satellite ground stations.
They also pay only for the time they use our ground station to communicate with their satellites and download their data. This means they can invest the capital that they would have spent on a ground station capability in the delivery of data to their customers.
We’ve also built our ground station in a co-located manner with our data centres. So, when satellite providers bring their data down to the AWS Ground Station, it’s ported directly into the AWS Cloud with minimum latency. This is very valuable to our customers as it allows them to easily leverage AWS’s cloud-based services, such as machine learning and advanced data analytics, to gain insights quickly.
How else does AWS intend to help the space industry continue transforming?
One of the things I love about AWS is we go wherever our customers need us to go.
Our customers told us they needed cloud capability on satellites, and we demonstrated that through partnerships with Italian company D-Orbit and Swedish venture Unibap. Together, we ran a suite of AWS compute and machine learning software on D-Orbit’s orbiting satellite, in a first-of-its-kind space experiment.
The experiment was conducted over 10 months last year in low Earth orbit and aimed to test a faster, more efficient method to collect and analyse valuable space data directly on their orbiting satellites using the cloud.
Traditionally, space companies collect raw satellite data in orbit before transferring all that data to a ground station on Earth (also known as downlink) and processing it. This is time-consuming and costly as only some of the data is useful. Sometimes, the data is unusable, or the satellite image captured is similar to the previous day’s. What they really want to know is when something changes.
So, the cloud package we built and put on orbit detects changes. It only downlinks data when there’s something meaningful to report, which helps drive down cost, increase the efficiency of the satellite and provides a new capability to the customer faster than before.
We also have customers who need cloud-based capabilities on the moon and Mars, so we’ll help them utilise automation, robotics, machine learning and more to achieve their mission.
We’ll continue going wherever our customers take us — and that might include the moon and Mars, which is very exciting.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length
