AWS Ground Station first customers include DigitalGlobe, BlackSky and Spire

Pay-as-you-go 'ground station-as-a-service' is aimed at lowering costs and streamlining processes

Amazon Web Services' latest offering dubbed AWS Ground Station will count DigitalGlobe, a provider of high-resolution Earth imagery, data and analysis, BlackSky, a global monitoring and alerting services provider, and maritime, aviation and weather tracking company Spire Global among its first customers.

Capella Space, Open Cosmos and HawkEye 360 make up the other initial customers who will use the service to access antennas on demand, with other organisations able to use the preview version from Tuesday.

At the Re:Invent conference in Las Vegas on Tuesday, AWS CEO Andy Jassy told delegates that the cloud provider was launching Ground Station because customers - including businesses, researchers, governments and space agencies - had been having issues uploading and downloading data from satellites orbiting Earth.

"You first need a number of antennas, and you need them situated all over the world, given where the satellites are. Then if you're going to upload and downlink that data, you need to write all sorts of business logic and script, and in order to analyse, store and do analytics on top of it, all of those things are very difficult to do, and aside from the complexity, it's expensive too," he said.

AWS Ground Station enables customers to download data from satellites into AWS global infrastructure regions using a fully managed network of 12 ground station antennas located across the world. Amazon hopes all 12 will be in operation by the middle of 2019.

According to the cloud provider, once customers receive satellite data at a ground station, they can immediately process it in an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance, store it in Amazon S2, apply AWS analytics and machine learning services and use Amazon's network to move the data to other regions and processing facilities.

Customers will be able to use the service on a pay-as-you-go basis, and they will be able to pre-purchase a set amount of downlink time, AWS confirmed in a blog post.

Walter Scott, CTO of DigitalGlobe, explained on stage that using AWS Ground Station was the latest step in its journey to be "all in with AWS", adding that the use of the product would enable the company to get data into the cloud In under a minute, which will ultimately affect the way the company can respond to natural disasters such as wildfires as well as helping to navigate autonomous cars with additional data such as adverse weather conditions, among various other use cases of satellite data.

In addition, DigitalGlobe believes the service will save time by eliminating certain processes, save money and provide timely actionable information for its customers to make better decisions.

In a statement, Jereon Cappaert, CTO and co-founder of another customer, Spire Global said:

"The world's weather, ships, and planes don't wait for us to down-link our data so a diverse global footprint is key. The prospect of using AWS Ground Station to quickly scale the depth of our ground station network on the fly gives us more time to focus on delivering our products to customers.

"Providing machine learning based technologies like ship location prediction and advanced weather data require intense scalable data processing and storage. By giving ground stations direct access to AWS, we can build on the ways in which we already leverage cloud services for our compute and processing needs," he said.

At the press conference, Rick Ambrose, executive vice president of Lockheed Martin Space, discussed a partnership between the two companies, which would integrate AWS Ground Station with Lockheed Martin's new Verge antenna network.

He suggested that by lowering the cost of getting information from space to Earth, the partnership would lower the barrier of entry for environmental researchers.

Robert W Sproles, program manager of ground station for Spire Global said the combination of Ground Station and Verge would "allow multiple satellites to downlink simultaneously, which will increase satellite constellation throughput and reduce latency for our customers".