Welcome to Pathfinder #0025, brought to you by Spaced Ventures, the planet’s first public space investment portal.

Today, we’ll be talking about what in the world Amazon is up to in space, with someone who can speak to this probably better than almost anyone else on the planet. Clint Crosier served in the US Air Force and Space Force for 33 years, and helped stand up the latter branch. After retiring as a major general, Amazon recruited Clint to lead AWS’s Aerospace and Satellites division.

AWS is short for Amazon Web Services, which you’ll hear a lot in this conversation. For the uninitiated, AWS is the world’s leading cloud computing vendor by market share and revenue. In the last calendar year, Amazon’s cloud unit made $62 billion, representing a 37% year over year increase over 2020. And it posted an $18 billion operating profit.

AWS’s Aerospace & Satellites group announced today that it had achieved a first, by running artificial intelligence/machine learning algorithms on a real-life, orbiting satellite. Clint and Ryan unpack the announcement, and also discuss what his team’s building, who they’re working with, how cloud and space fit together, and a whole lot more.

CHAPTERS

0:00 - Intro

5:54 - Clint’s résumé and life before AWS

7:43 - 33 years of “flying satellites and launching rockets” … and the highlight of his career: standing up the US Space Force

13:10 - After leaving the military, career space folks were asking Clint: “Why are you at AWS and what are you trying to accomplish over there?” … and his “light bulb” moment

16:07 - Why is AWS getting into the space industry? … and why cloud penetration within the space industry still in the early innings

23:04 - “The AWS for space is AWS Space”

25:06 - As it sets up everything from ground segment services to geospatial analytics products, where has the learning curve been steepest for AWS Aerospace & Satellites? (plus…the tyranny of SWAP: size, weight, and power)

27:55 - AWS’s compute + machine-learning experiment on orbit

29:10 - Bringing cloud capabilities to solve real-world space data relay challenges for NASA

36:45 - Processing data on Earth vs processing data in-orbit

41:01 - Cloud and lunar colonization?

44:06 - Case studies: "When I was a young captain flying communications satellites, we would have 20 people on a particular shift flying eight satellites. Today, companies like Capella have two or three people operating 15 satellites.” Lunar Outpost did 100% of its design for a lunar mission using digital AWS tools, and LeoLabs uses the AWS cloud to run very sophisticated collision detection models

45:15 - SSA and why we need to understand where objects are and what they’re doing on orbit

50:40- Clint’s career role model and his most contrarian view on the future of space

ABOUT US

Pathfinder is brought to you by Payload, a modern space media brand built from the ground up for a new age of space exploration and commercialization. We deliver need-to-know news and insights daily to 12,000+ decision-makers across commercial, civil, and military space. Payload began as a weekly newsletter sent to a handful of friends and colleagues. Today, we have three media properties and publish across multiple platforms. Our team is distributed across four time zones and two continents. We aim to inform but also educate and entertain, and we serve a highly concentrated audience of decision-makers in the commercial, civil, and military space sectors.

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Amazon's Space Ambitions, with Maj. Gen. Clint Crosier (Ret.)

Valley of Depth