AWS in Orbit: Extending the resilient edge to space.

[ Sound Effects ] It's April 12th, so happy International Day of Human Spaceflight everybody, aka Yuri's Night.

Yes, it was on this day in 1961 that the Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was the first person in history to go to space.

Gagarin completed one orbit of the Earth in the Vostok-1 spacecraft, and his flight lasted a mere 108 minutes, that's not too bad though, and it was the only spaceflight that he was on.

Okay, Alice, at Symposium everybody told me they love, they love for some reason, these Friday jokes, so it's Friday, let's do this.

Okay, you ready for this?

I got my inspiration from Yuri Gagarin, so it's got to be good, right?

I'm bracing myself.

What is the difference between an astronaut and a cosmonaut, Marie?

I would imagine a cosmonaut made me like a Cosmo for a drink, and I don't know what an astronaut drinks whiskey.

No, astronauts take it slow, cosmonauts are always Russian.

God!

Alice!

T-minus.

Twenty seconds to L-O-I, 24.

Today is April 12th, and we're bringing you the last of our AWS in orbit series from the 39th Space Symposium, and we're bringing you the last of our AWS in orbit series from the 39th Space Symposium, and we're bringing you the last of our AWS in orbit series, from the 39th Space Symposium.

Today, Marie will be speaking to AWS for aerospace and satellites, and their customer, Ibridium, about extending the resilient edge to space.

It's a great chat, so stay with us for the second part of the show.

[Music] Happy Friday, everybody, and we hope that all of you that spent the last week in Colorado have either made it back to your home region safely, or are in safe transit right now, and are ready for another busy week next week in space.

As for today, we're starting today's briefing with an update on the Space System Command's Victus Hayes Tactically Responsive Space Mission, or TACRS.

Unsurprisingly, Rocket Lab has been selected to design, build, launch, and operate a rendezvous proximity mission-capable spacecraft for the mission.

The contract with SSC is valued at $32 million for Rocket Lab's work.

Additionally, True Anomaly has also been selected to provide its Jackal Autonomous Orbital Vehicle for the mission.

Under the Emergent Need Small Business Innovation Research Award, made by SSC's Space Safari Program Office in partnership with Spaceworks, the Space Force will fund $30 million of a total $60 million effort, and True Anomaly will leverage $30 million of private capital.

Now, the goal of Victus Hayes is to apply commercial products to provide highly capable solutions for future TACRS operations.

The multi-vehicle demonstration will enable the development of TACRS tactics, techniques, and procedures, and prepare the Space Force and US Space Command to deploy available response options necessary to deter adversary aggression on orbit.

True Anomaly and Rocket Lab will demonstrate their ability to build rendezvous and proximity operation-capable space vehicles, and command and control centers with a delivery target of fall 2025.

Pretty awesome.

Now, SpaceX launched its second national security mission of the year on Thursday, carrying a mission for the US Space Force called USSF-62 on a Falcon 9 rocket.

USSF-62 is a weather system follow-on microwave satellite that will provide "critical and actionable weather intelligence to military operations in all war-fighting domains according to the BAE systems, which developed and built the satellite."

The US Department of Education, Women in Aerospace, AIAA, Club for the Future, and the Space Foundation have announced a collaboration with more than 150 companies to develop Space for All, and the five-year awareness campaign aims to raise public understanding of the benefits of space for life on Earth.

Fantastic.

Space for All will convey the importance of everyone participating in and benefiting from the space enterprise and increase public awareness of the opportunities and pathways to success in space and STEM-related education and careers.

What a great initiative.

The US State Department announced possible changes to the export control process at the Space Symposium.

Chirag Pari, Executive Secretary of the National Space Council said, "It's been over a decade since we had the last significant amount of export control review on space technology.

I think the technology has evolved.

I think the global capabilities of space have evolved.

So a possible easing of ITAR restrictions are on the horizon.

We will bring you more when things get into motion."

Thank you, everybody.

And staying with the Space Symposium, the whole N2K team noted the amount of foreign military presence at the event this week.

It was really remarkable to see so many in their formal dress uniforms.

No wonder the rest of us had to suffer in formal attire, though it was nice to see the men doing more than the women for once.

Anyway, a lot of meetings were happening on the sidelines of the conference, and many announcements were made.

In addition to the announcement earlier this week between US Space Comm and Spain, US Command and the Brazilian Air Force have also signed an arrangement to assign a Brazilian liaison officer to US Space Comm.

Now, foreign liaison officers are direct conduits into US Space Comm headquarters and represent their nation's equities.

The liaison officer will provide Brazilian Armed Forces expertise and insights to US Space Comm, facilitate communications among Brazilian and US Space Units, support US-Brazil space-related partnership opportunities, and perform tasks that are mutually beneficial for the US-Brazilian defense cooperation.

And I should note, we also stopped by the Space Force booth at Symposium to hear these remarks from Lieutenant Colonel Scott Munn, who is the Vice Commander of Space Delta II.

Our primary mission is to understand the domain, and that's evolved.

You know, you look at the last ten years, we went from being a benign environment to a contested environment.

Not only has the number of launches increased, but we've seen exponential increase in payloads that have been deployed.

So this is some challenges.

And unfortunately, what we're also seeing a company in that is a lot of nefarious activities that are creating some bad, I think, norms in our industry.

And so Delta II and some of our preceding organizations have been with a charge to understand that domain, and more importantly kind of putting context, particularly today, in the combatting function.

So you know, you go back, it's really not that long, maybe four years to go and we have this thing called space situation awareness.

I think many have still oscillated with that today, and that really was nothing more than just a site picture.

It was a myopic at best of understanding of what was in orbit.

And I hate to say it was really the things that we knew were already in orbit, we just kind of monitored those and tracked those things.

Then we evolved to stand up at the US Space Force, this thing called space domain awareness.

And Delta II formed.

A lot of folks like myself, I hate to say, thought, oh, it's just a naming convention change.

In actuality, it's not.

As I've really dived into this job as the Vice Commander now for two years, what we found is a radical change from what space situation awareness was.

It was really that site picture to SDA being an understanding of what's going on in the domain.

So I spent the evolution, and that understanding really is captured through the intelligence piece.

It's easy to see launches go up, it's easy to test sensors to keep monitoring track of the things we know about.

But the evolution in SDA has really been the understanding of what are those objects, particularly spacecraft, doing.

And more importantly, what threat do they propose?

Right?

So Delta II today, what we do is we look at that understanding, understand that in itself is not enough.

That just today understanding of what the assets are and what their potential is, is not going to keep us ahead of the threat.

So Delta II understands, turning that understanding into really military decision making options for our national leaders.

And we do that with what we call battle space awareness, right?

Or battle space management.

And this is nothing new, though it's new to space operators.

It's joint doctrine, many of the services in e-domain look at battle management.

It's not something that we uniquely do in our domain.

We do apply that.

It's a discipline of looking at the world a little bit differently.

And we utilize that to take what we consider the SDA understanding and translate that through battle management practices to better understand what are our options.

So that kind of leads into what our mission and vision is.

Roughly summarized is that we are a combat focused organization that our intent is really to secure our our nations, our allies, and our partners' interests in from into space.

We had lift off from Russia on Thursday for the Angara A5 rocket after days of scrubs.

The rocket finally launched from the Voskosnyi Cosmodrome in the country's Far East.

Technical glitches had prompted officials to abort missions at the last minute for two days in a row.

The Angara A5 is a Russian made heavy lift vehicle with a payload capacity of 24.5 tonnes.

Roscosmos announced on social media that the rocket worked according to the plan.

The upper stage separated and is currently putting the test payload into target orbit.

And we're finishing our Intel brief with another anniversary.

Hey, happy birthday to ESA's juice mission.

Today marks one year since the launch of the European Space Agency's Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, also known as juice.

We've included a great juicy blog post by ESA in our show notes sharing insights from the team one year into their mission.

You'll also find links to all the other stories we've mentioned in the selected reading section along with an update on Australia's Gilmore Space Technology's Ares rocket, which is expected to have its first launch next month, and an announcement from the space agencies in the UK and Canada on enhancing cooperation in space.

Hey, T-minus crew, tune in tomorrow for T-minus Deep Space, which is our show for extended interviews, special editions, and deep dives with some of the most influential professionals in the space industry.

And tomorrow we have former NASA astronaut Nicole Stott talking about her outreach programs and the space for Art Foundation.

So check it out while you're recovering from the space symposium this weekend or making up for that week away from your kids by being their Uber driver to all their social engagements.

Not that I can relate, but I totally relate.

Or simply kicking your feet up and taking some well-deserved time for yourself.

You don't want to miss it.

And a quick programming note, I am out next week on a post-space symposium vacation, but you all will be in the best of hands with Alice at the mic.

[Music] (upbeat music) (air whooshing) (upbeat music) - Hi, I'm Maria Varmasus, host of the T-Minus Space Daily podcast, and this is AWS in orbit, connected by Iridium, powered by AWS.

And we're bringing you the third installment of AWS in orbit, the podcast series at the 39th Space Symposium.

In this episode, I'm speaking with representatives from Iridium and AWS Aerospace and Satellite about extending the resilient edge to space. (upbeat music) Okay, Jim, can you start and tell us a little bit about yourself? - Sure, I'm Jim Tran.

I lead the government solutions team for Iridium.

Part of my mission is to help evangelize, help educate, really push more capabilities out to our end users.

That's of course, US forces, intelligence community customers and coalition partners as well.

Firstly, I just wanted to say how important AWS is to us as a company, especially how we are truly pushing capabilities to a tactical edge, and looking forward to jumping into some use cases as we continue. - Fantastic, Clint, over to you please for an intro. - Yeah, thank you, and thank you, Maria.

And Jim, thanks so much for being here.

Jim and I have known each other for a few years.

The space industry is smaller than you might think.

And so we have an opportunity to work together in a number of different ways, but really do appreciate the partnership from Iridium and you in particular, Jim.

So I'm Clint Crozier, and I think I have the coolest job in the world.

Jim can arm wrestle me if he wants to, but so I spent 33 years on active duty in the US Air Force and the US Space Force.

My whole career flying satellites and launching rockets.

So I used to command the GPS satellite constellation that we all use of commanded missile warning satellites and communication satellites, and done space launch and space policy.

And then my last assignment, I had the real privilege of leading the establishment of the US Space Force.

And after I retired, I had a wonderful opportunity, AWS looking across the global space industry, recognizing we have these world-class technologies, artificial intelligence, machine learning, advanced data analytics, all the things that Jim and Iridium use.

And we were looking to create a business that would focus and cater to that industry.

And so thus was born the aerospace and satellite business unit within AWS.

And I have the privilege of leading that.

So my job each and every day is to sit down with Jim and companies like Iridium and just help them figure out how to leverage the cloud to achieve new innovation in their mission sets. - Fantastic intro is both of you.

Thank you so much for joining me today.

So Jim, let's start with you.

We're hearing already so much about the partnership between Iridium and AWS.

Let's start with, tell me a bit about Iridium first. - Sure, we're a global constellation.

We like to say we were Leo before Leo was cool.

Obviously there's a lot of Leo. - That's true.

I mean, that's absolutely true.

I used the Iridium constellation a decade and a half ago. - That's right. - Yeah, wow. - And as I think-- - As a military user. - Precisely, and I think a lot of the first experiences are with a handheld handset.

That of course were pretty prolific through all of the different wars and different conflicts we've been involved in.

But Iridium so much more.

We're actually an ecosystem of about, what about 540 different partners out there?

What we actually do is create a network.

And the network is so very complicated.

I can tell you with three decades of satellite communications experience, I was blown away as soon as I came to Iridium to see how difficult it really is to fly the capabilities.

But the reality is it's our partners that create Iridium in terms of the end products.

Of the 540 or 50 or so, I say that there's another handful. 40 or 50 different customers, customer focus groups.

These guys I call them the Q branch.

They develop government capabilities. - Yeah, from James Bond. - Absolutely. - Like the math scientist type. - That's my description by the way. - No, I get it, the math scientist type. - But they're building amazing things.

Things that can operate in low probability detection environments or even just offering positional awareness for either blue force tracking capabilities.

But these are the real life bread of the real heartbeat I would say of Iridium.

It's the different partners in the ecosystem that's out there. - Fantastic. - Yeah, that Leo before Leo was cool.

I'm just gonna foot stump that again. - You've been operating a Leo satellite consolation, satcom consolation for decades really before proliferated.

Leo started picking up in gaining traction.

So one of the things on the Q branch, one of the things that I love about my job, your job, the work we do together is innovating new things.

And I know we're going to talk about Iridium Cloud Connect here in a few minutes, but that was a product of that.

That was a product of people sitting down and saying, okay, you have some world leading, you know, IoT capability.

We've got global infrastructure, resilient, redundant, et cetera.

How do we bring those two things together and really create value for your customers?

And so when you say Q branch, my head goes first to Iridium Cloud Connect. - That's fantastic. - Yeah, there's so much going on.

But firstly, I think the history of the relationship is also important to highlight.

We go back 2017, 2018, I think is when we started our initial foray.

But what we found is that really, it's not just a vendor-partner relationship.

We're actually working a lot together to create better solutions and capabilities for the end users and specifically over manage IoT capabilities.

And that could be short burst data type solutions of which we are the perfect network to support.

Or it could be providing telemedicine, telemedicine, lots of the different evolutions in the IoT environment we're certainly taking full advantage of.

And of course, we rely very heavily on AWS to help us deliver that. - Yeah, please tell me more about those missions that y'all enabled.

I would love to hear more about that. - There's so much that we're doing, right?

To say that we are read on and we're supporting lots of different levels would perhaps be an understatement.

And it's not being a braggart and certainly not flexing.

But the reality is it depends on what your Iridium device you're using, for example.

Where it would fit into a customer-missing absolutely-missing profile.

So going back to your original comment, you said I used to use the phones.

Well, we also have internet-capable devices.

We have more broadband-capable devices.

But we're also finding that a lot of our partners, and I do wanna highlight that 'cause we're constantly signing up new partners, they're starting to realize how we can augment their missions as well.

And if we're all familiar, of course, being out here in Colorado Springs, the term pace plan, where we fit.

So there's lots of primary alternative communications out there that are heavy lifters.

But what happens when you are in a wet environment?

You're gonna need something that's resilient, reliant, always works, which is what your Iridium's very proud of, to be the C or the E, the contingency or the emergency part of the pace plan.

So we have so many partners, and we're continuing to sign up new ones.

Be on the lookout over the next few weeks to see some of the new press release.

That's exciting, there you go.

>> So the always works piece is really interesting to me too.

So two things, one, you are and have been a world leader, a global leader in narrowband IoT capability.

And the win-win piece, back on Iridium Cloud Connect, the win-win piece is you've got world leading capability for narrowband IoT, device management, internet of things.

And I read something the other day that experts believe that there will be some 50 billion devices connected in the IoT environment in the next five years.

I can't even get my head around that.

And even if they're off by 10%, so it's 45 billion, I don't know.

>> Just counting at that point.

>> Very good number.

So I mean, world leader, and then when you think about, so you've got that world leading capability, and we have hundreds of thousands of customers, millions of customers who are thirsty for an IoT capability to connect their devices and already building and operating on the AWS Cloud.

Where the win-win comes together is we have some customers, remote boiling gas, remote agriculture, et cetera.

And so we sort of had it a gap in the AWS Cloud is almost everywhere, but not everywhere, but you, with your 66 ball constellation, as we say, global coverage on the LeoSide, you can provide that last tactical mile, that last tactical foot, if you will.

So you're literally connecting disadvantaged users that want to use narrowband IoT, but just didn't have that last mile access to the Cloud, or Iridium provides that.

And it sort of, it closes the loop on both sides of the mission.

>> I couldn't have sold that better myself, honestly.

>> That's crazy.

>> Yeah, the reality is we do rely very heavily on our partnership to really create that optimal capability performance to the edge.

And you're absolutely right.

Some of the use cases there is not just, the aforementioned solutions, but even tracking cattle, for example.

>> Oh yeah, yeah.

>> And figuring out migration of animals, for example.

There's so many different applications out there, but it's a lot more than of course, just the commercial or the government side.

It's really connecting the entire planet.

And I agree, that number will probably rapidly-- >> Oh, I think it will.

>> How hasty.

>> I think it's low.

Yeah, I think it's low.

By the way, when you talk about tracking cattle, the ways, Jim, over the course of our careers and our lifetimes, the ways we're seeing, I would never have envisioned the ways we're using space data today.

I mean, five years ago, 10 years, I never would have thought, but it's due to innovation like companies like yours that are helping unlock.

At AWS, we call it, we do a couple of missions.

One of my key focus areas is the space business leader at AWS is this line of effort, line of work I call making the world a better place from space.

>> Nice.

>> And so that's what you've just described, right?

All these ways we're making the world a better place from space.

You also mentioned always on, always connected, and I wanna underscore that for a second.

I'll get a little geeky here just for a second.

>> Please, we love that.

>> But you operate on the L-band, right?

>> That's right.

>> And so what's really exciting, ladies and gentlemen?

>> We're using an L-band, K-band, T-band.

>> What's really exciting about the L-band is the L-band is the most durable in terms of weather phenomena.

And by the way, that's why, again, former commander of the GPS satellite constellation, that's why your GPS that you use day, night, snow, rain, wind, hail always operates on the L-band.

>> There you go.

>> And so they're operating on the same band that we know provides the best capability.

>> I did not know that.

>> All weather, day, night, inclement, everything else.

So when you say always on, always connected, it truly is more than any other signal.

>> Well, thank you for that.

There's also a lot of capabilities too.

And this is, I think, the interesting part about our relationship.

And you guys are also getting read on while the rest of the world is too.

So L-band being very resilient, especially in wet environments or inclement weather environments, but there's other capabilities on board.

Namely, we have GPS denial service attack capable solutions.

>> Always a problem, right?

>> Well, especially now.

And if you're looking at how geopolitics is realigning itself all around the world, I can cite very specific instances, and maybe I won't go into full detail, but GPS denial service attacks are getting more and more prolific.

So much so that they are taking out different size regions of different parts of the world.

So why is that important?

Well, there's not just a tactical requirement, but practically everything on the planet also relies on GPS timing to operate.

So whether you're an utility company, a cell phone company, an energy company of some other sorts, swiping your credit card at the gas pump, relies on GPS timing signals.

>> So for a different environment, we can certainly get into it, but the capabilities that we have on board and what we can provide to augment the requirements out there is very prolific and certainly something that has commercial, humanitarian, as well as tactical ramifications.

>> Can you get into that at all?

I mean, I'd love to hear a little more about that.

>> Well, maybe a little bit.

>> Maybe, whatever you can, I'd love to hear a little more.

>> So we'll speak in general terms.

>> Absolutely.

>> Through our recent acquisition of Satellis, of which they've been an onboard capability.

>> It's exciting, yeah.

>> Absolutely, and we're so thrilled to have them.

It's been an onboard capability, but they're officially within the Eurydian family now.

>> Understood.

>> So what we are calling it, we're calling it Eurydian PNT or STL, but essentially position navigation and timing that provides alternative GPS always on so that you don't have to rely on GPS, especially if the adversaries per se are jamming it and they're jamming it to such a high rate.

The good thing is that even when you jam, and sir, I know you know this, it's a finite amount of time.

You can't just keep things on, jamming endlessly, but at some point here, why even bother with that?

Let's create the alternative solution today that they can't jam and then make sure that we don't have to have disruption again in our daily lives.

>> We always want resiliency and redundancy, in any mission, by the way, whether it's weather or ISR or space-based observation, whatever, we always want resiliency and redundancy, and you provide that.

You're bringing that not only with the news to tell us, but I think you'll agree having built on AWS, we provide sort of that global resiliency and redundancy to operate your constellation.

>> So that's another great point.

So with AWS, it's not just what we're doing commercially.

There's also ramifications to the government.

We are the EMSS contract holder.

That is a specific contract that supports all US government end users.

>> Enhanced mobile satellite service.

>> Thank you.

>> And mobile satellite service.

>> Precisely, thank you.

So the reality is that, we call it the DoD's family plan.

Whether it's one user or a million users, it's already a fixed cost that everyone should take and benefit.

Well, what's also important to realize is that those government end users, while I can see, and really, I have this amazing global footprint.

In fact, if I ever showed you a picture, an instantaneous picture of how many Iridium devices are on at any given time of the day, millions.

I think we're up to 2.6 million subscribers right now.

>> Wow, yeah, wow.

>> But I can see all of those guys, but what I can't see are the many hundreds of thousands of DoD and coalition partners, because what we want to do is make sure we're protecting our end users so that they aren't visible to different partners.

They're not visible to different actors out there.

But what's important about that is, you could be anywhere on the planet as a DoD or coalition partner user, and the entire traffic will traverse bird to bird all the way across birds and old term, we like to say space vehicles, but it'll traverse the entire network and only land in one location, which is of course Hawaii, where we are also very connected and working together, not only for current capabilities to deliver tactical communications to the edge, but we're now also talking about what the next generation offering looks like.

So we are very tied at the hip, not only for what we're doing commercially, but certainly for the government side as well.

>> Yeah, so everybody wants security and privacy, right?

Whether it's a government user or individual users, farmers that don't want competitors know where their livestock is at, what are the case, maybe?

>> Where they're feeding, that's right.

>> Or where they're feeding.

>> Any reason is a good reason.

>> Any reason, we all want security and we all want privacy.

>> Of course.

>> And what you just said that I sort of love about this partnership, but we built together too to underscore is because you have global coverage with your 66 ball, you know, 66 satellite constellation, because you have global coverage, and by the way, some on-orbit spares too, which is always a good plan as well in terms of resiliency and redundancy.

But because you do, and the way you've architected with AWS, when you land your data, when you land your traffic, it never touches the public internet, right?

Because it lands directly to your site and then we have a direct connection between your site and AWS.

>> Ah.

>> Private connection, us and you, nobody else has access to that.

>> Yeah.

>> And so customers can be assured that when they're using a radium on AWS, not only do you get the world-class security encryption that comes in your capability in ours, but you never touch the private internet into a closed system the whole time.

>> That's right, yeah.

Total security to the edge for the end users, especially those with the most important mission.

>> Absolutely.

>> The other thing I really like, Jim, and maybe you can talk about what this has meant for you, is, you know, there are millions of users around the globe, you know, everybody from, my wife bought a new refrigerator last year and it's IoT connected.

>> Is it internet enabled?

Oh, fine.

>> Right?

We can be at the grocery store and she can pull up the camera and say, "Oh, I'm out of milk 'cause you've got, all right?"

I mean, so, you know, it's everywhere.

But as we think about all that capability and we think about, you know, so that is growing, like you said, 46 billion might be an understatement.

But everybody who wants to use that IoT capability when they want to complete the last tactical mile, if you will, they don't know how to go out and provision a satellite provider, right?

They have no idea how to go do that, but because we built it together, if you're an AWS user using AWS IoT capability, we can connect you, internal to the family, to that last tactical mile and get you started in space communications when you don't even know what space communications is, right?

And that makes it super easy to add more customers to your mission set. - Yeah, I can't pre-telegraph too much, but beyond the lookout to see the various different developmental capabilities we're working with, different partners on right now, that will absolutely light up hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of different types of end users.

Of course, all reliant on IoT and pushing different capabilities out there. - That's exciting.

And Clint, I love that you referred to it as a family.

I think that really speaks to the strength of the partnership here. - It really does. - It really does.

It is. - Yeah. - And Jim has gotten us all exciting about, I'm aware of some, but I'm curious to see whether there's some other things that come in that I might not know about, which would be great.

But what that highlights too, by the way, is I think about it, everything that we've been describing, when we think about the excitement and technology today, space captures everybody's imagination, telco, right, telecommunications.

And then IoT, those are three technology areas that are really growing, really booming, and everything we're doing together sort of circles in that orbit, space pun intended, right?

Circles in that orbit of space, telco, I got a laugh, right?

Space, it was a late laugh, but I got a laugh. - It took me a second. - Space, telco, and IoT.

And so, you know, all those leading technologies coming together.

And by the way, you're leaning into 5G, right, in a big way as well.

And so that's going to connect yet another rapidly growing industry part of the mission family as well. - Yeah, so we are absolutely leaning forward 5G, looking at different alternatives and NTN type of activities.

The reality is our network today is perfectly supportive of a lot of the solutions and capabilities out there, especially when you're beyond line of sight, which is part of the draw. - Mm-hmm, yeah. - There's also perhaps a more serious side of that, and it's not only adopting and making sure that we support the current standards, but making sure we're also there to evolve for future standards.

So we are, we're very considerate, and our partnerships today and our discussions are encompassing not only what is important today, but also looking at 3E5, even 10 years down the road. - Scalability and flexibility.

We have to build future capabilities together, not just to satisfy the technical requirement today, but can expand flexibly and scalably, as I said, to grow into what?

Because the industry's changing so fast. - Yes, it sure is. - So you have to build it in a way that it can be modular and scalable.

And you're doing that, and that's wonderful.

I love seeing that. - I've been really enjoying listening to the two of you.

You clearly have a wonderful working relationship.

It's fantastic.

And I think it just speaks so well to how well Iridium and AWS work together to do so much for their customers.

So it's just really been fantastic.

I know we're coming up on time, it has flown by.

I want to make sure I give you each a chance to give us some parting thoughts.

So Clint, can you get, how about you start? - Yeah, well, again, thanks, Jim, for being here.

I really appreciate your personal presence and appreciate the partnership that we've had with Iridium over the last number of years.

I will tell you sort of on a personal note, I'm coming up on four years with AWS.

And I will tell you in my first 30 days, the first big project I worked in my first 30 days four years ago was the announcement of Iridium CloudConnect.

That was my first project at AWS.

So that's very exciting.

But hey, space is rapidly growing.

I mean, space is exciting.

You know, our tagline, space is cool.

That's what I tell people all the time.

Space is cool, space is fun, space is exciting.

But when you bring world leading space capability like what Iridium offers and world leading cloud capability, which we believe AWS offers, and you bring those two things together, we're set out to create a new industry within industry, my team, my mission, the space cloud industry.

And so when you bring space experts and cloud experts together at the way we've been able to do, it unlocks extraordinary innovation for the future.

And that's the piece I'm most excited about. - It is very exciting.

Jim, you get the last word. - Well, I mean, first and foremost, obviously, it's that partnership that we've talked about over and over again is very important to us.

As a company, we're of course not only committed to our end customers, but also pushing the envelope, constantly evolving, bringing new capabilities and solutions out there that are meaningful and will benefit in a positive way.

And you know, again, just thank you for the opportunity and just continuing to work with AWS is obviously very important to us. - Yeah, well, it's our pleasure.

And keep posted for the next big announcements. - Seriously. - Watch here. - I know, right?

I'm excited to learn what that is.

So I guess we'll stay tuned for that.

Well, Jim and Clint, gentlemen, thank you so much for joining me today.

It's been a pleasure. - Thank you. - And thank you, Maureen. - Thank you. - I appreciate it. - Appreciate it. - Thanks so much. (upbeat music) , (upbeat music) , (upbeat music) - That's it for Team Miners for April the 12th, 2024.

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This episode was produced by Alice Carruth, mixing by Elliot Peltzman and Trey Hester with original music and sound design by Elliot Peltzman.

Our associate producer is Liz Stokes.

Our executive producer is Jen Iben.

Our VP is Brandon Karpf and I'm Maria Varmazes.

Thanks for listening everybody.

We'll see you next time. (upbeat music) - Team Miners. (upbeat music) (wind blowing) [BLANK_AUDIO]