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Maria Varmazis: Welcome to "AWS in Orbit." I'm Maria Varmazis. We're working with AWS to bring you an in-depth look at the transformative intersection of cloud computing, space technologies, and generative AI. On "AWS in Orbit" we're exploring not just what's possible, but what's meaningful in the realm of space and cloud innovation. We grapple with complex challenges and unparalleled opportunities that arise when we use space to address pressing issues right here on Earth. [ Music ] This is Scaling Space Safety and Agility, with Astroscale. [ Music ] You know, we're asking a lot of the satellites in the Earth orbit. There's more and more of them practically every day and we're making them to be more maneuverable, to dock, to receive propellant boosts, and even to one day make things while on orbit. To perform these increasingly complex tasks, we need to communicate with those satellites and send and receive large amounts of data more quickly than ever. Put is all together, and you have a fascinating technical challenge, doing lots more, lots faster in an ever crowded field all while keeping spacecraft safe from debris and each other. So, how to tackle this challenge at scale? Well, let's hear from Astroscale and AWS, to walk us through how they're making it happen.
Andrew Faiola: I'm Andrew Faiola. I'm the Commercial Director here at Astroscale, UK. Astroscale, UK is the UK entity of Astroscale. We are focused on In-Orbit Servicing for low-Earth orbit in the UK. I'm responsible for all of our business development and marketing, and my background is in satellite communications both from the space side and the ground side. So, what we're doing here at Astroscale is incredibly fascinating to me, really enjoy coming to work every day because I'm learning something new every day, but ultimately what we're trying to do here is make In-Orbit Servicing routine in the future, so.
Maria Varmazis: That's awesome. And I will ask you more about Astroscale's mission in just a moment, but I want to make sure I get to Allegra's intro as well, because you are the second voice we'll be hearing in this podcast Allegra, so.
Allegra Matarangas: Thank you. My name is Allegra Matarangas. I am the Senior Account Executive at AWS. I'm responsible for supporting a territory of customers which I'm fortunate enough that I get to work with Astroscale globally in doing so. Within AWS, I am part of the Aerospace Satellite IBU. AWS stood up this industry business vertical four years ago, with the sole intent of the enabling customer missions in space, aerospace and defense in the satellite domain.
Maria Varmazis: Thank you both so much for those great intros and thank you so much for joining me today. Astroscale and Astroscale UK specifically, you have an incredible mission. Andrew, can you tell me a bit about the amazing things that you all are working on?
Andrew Faiola: Sure. We have an amazing mission both Astroscale UK and Astroscale writ large really working on how we can build a sustainable economy in space help Atroscale, as well as our customers and people operating in space operate safely, operate securely, and ultimately also operate profitably. We have focused to-date, largely on individual missions. The first of those was an Astroscale UK mission back in 2021 called "ELSA-d." ELSA standing for End-of-Life Services by Astroscale and the "d" meaning, demo, where we demonstrated the first private commercial capability to capture a piece of debris. Now, we actually brought that debris with us into orbit, and pushed it away from the spacecraft from the service or vehicle, and then were able to go and collect and capture using our magnetic capture system which is the first time that's ever been done. So, yeah, it's impressive stuff. Our Japanese team is currently in the process of winding down the ADRAS-J mission where they've gone and done a very, very close inspection of a Japanese rocket body which will, in a subsequent mission, be de-orbited. It will be captured by a different Astroscale servicer and de-orbited and in the UK, we have the sort of mission after that where we'll be launching another spacecraft, another ELSA spacecraft to go and capture a OneWeb spacecraft and de-orbit that. So, that will be the first time that two commercial organizations have ever had a docking and rendezvous and removal. So, there's a lot of other stuff on the plate as well with our US colleagues and, as well as our Japanese colleagues, and us, but those are the ones that are sort of immediately on the horizon as we really look to commercialize the business.
Maria Varmazis: I follow Astroscale with great interest, because what you all globally are doing is really, truly incredible. Can you tell me a bit about Astroscale UK, the work that you all are doing specifically on Space Situational Awareness?
Andrew Faiola: Sure. So, with regard to Space Situational Awareness, this is an, I think an adjunct of that space domain awareness, this is an area that's becoming more and more important for the industry, for defense and security as well for people to understand the environment in which they are operating better. And so, what does that mean? Today, we've got ground-based systems. There are also some space-based systems to image in different ways what that space domain looks like. But we, in Astroscale, have our own part to play in that as well, because of the nature of the business that we do, we have very agile spacecraft that are one, they're much closer to the operational environment, they're not on the ground. But two, they are not in a fixed constellation type of environment. Our spacecraft are designed to move from one area to another area and do multiple servicing and, because of that and because of the sensors that we have onboard, we can provide a very special piece of that puzzle to provide that sort of much better fidelity of space situational awareness as part of the bigger whole.
Maria Varmazis: When you're describing that Andrew, I'm imagining the complexity of supporting a mission like that. I mean, my mind is blown a little bit about that capability and just what goes in to making that happen on the ground. Can you tell me a bit about that?
Andrew Faiola: Yeah. Well, and this is where AWS comes in to, into play as well. For the ELSA-d mission for example, we were largely using the cloud service provided by the satellite applications called "Catapult" here in the UK and then moved over to AWS. That enabled us to bring a lot more of the control in in-house over what we did. It enabled us to be more dynamic, you know, and sort of spin up and spin down infrastructure as required. So, that was more cost-effective. It also helped strengthen our disaster recovery posture as well. And like you say, one of the things, particularly as we go forward, is it's really important to us, you know, because of, again, the sort of way we operate and the ground network infrastructure that we need. You know, we're transmitting quite a lot of information to and from the ground and we need.
Maria Varmazis: I can only imagine.
Andrew Faiola: One, we need reliability, but two, because it's not necessarily predictable in the sense that most spacecraft that are orbiting today, particularly Earth observation spacecraft for example, are effectively always pointing down. And so, the antennas that communicate with the ground are always pointing down, it's quite predictably you know what's happening. As we talked about from the ADRAS-J mission for example, our spacecraft are traveling around in 3-dimensions; they're tumbling and the antenna arrays are sort of all over the place pointing in different directions at different times. So, when they are pointing at the ground, we need to make sure that we can get data down and data up reliably and quickly. And so, that means being able to have longer pastimes for example, where we can access ground infrastructure and that kind of reliability helps lower the latency; helps us in terms of decision-making and the security of the mission. So, that becomes really important in the type of sort of RPO operations, rendezvous and proximity operations that our spacecraft are doing for their bread and butter.
Maria Varmazis: That's fantastic. Allegra, this feels like a natural point for me to bring you in also. As Andrew just described, again, these are incredibly complex missions and the support they need from the ground stations that they're using at Astroscale, I mean, not sort of your typical what we think of sort of like the typical satellite operations, and AWS is supporting all this. So, I guess my question is, sort of like, what is it like to be supporting your mission like that? But yeah, why don't I let you just take a stab at that one. > Allegra Matarangas: Yeah. And I would also say besides it being such a novel, an innovative and exciting mission, it's also a new space for cloud and seeing where cloud capabilities can have new applications for supporting an industry that's really just at the tip of like branching out into so many different domains. So, as I mentioned earlier, AWS stood up this Aerospace and satellite business unit, specially, for working with strategic younger companies like Astroscale who are pushing the limits of what's possible in space, which in turn, has pushed the limits and helping us innovate on behalf of our customers to be mission partners to Astroscale. So, some of the cool things that we're looking to help Astroscale with for the future mission for ELSA, would be helping ground segment standardization, so what I mean by that, is that right now Astroscale has a ground segment in system setup that is a bit more bespoke. What we're trying to do is eliminate or at least mitigate manual management of these bespoke systems and create a standardized path moving forward, so Astroscale's workforce can scale and your resources can scale as well from and efficiency standpoint. By doing that, we are hoping that that a ground segment standardization, as well integration with Astroscale's mission control center, we can create a smoother operations path overall. [ Music ] Right now Astroscale works with AWS for supporting all of their mission control applications, so all the applications that are command and controlling the satellite or spacecraft objects. So, a smoother data integration between ground segment and the mission control applications, we're hoping will really help Astroscale scale for the mission launch in 2026. Yeah, Andrew tell me about working with AWS, that's going to be a fascinating conversation?
Andrew Faiola: I think, you know, Allegra hit the nail on the head when she talked about standardization, and for us this is key. There's a lot of parts of our business today that are what I'd consider "ad hoc" and need to move towards standardization if we want to have, you know, a commercially profitable business in the future where, again, where in-orbit servicing becomes routine. We're talking about missions, right? We're not talking about service lines yet. We're still proving these very novel technologies that Allegra mentioned, but that standardization for us will be key in terms of how we scale the business, you know, to go from being able to do, you know, one or two missions a year to be launching many missions-"missions" I say, but what I mean is services, right? What we are providing is a service for whether it's constellation operators, defense actors, institutional, we're solving problems that they have whether it has to do with spacecraft that have failed or perhaps in the future need to be refurbished or refueled; we need to help mitigate the risk of there being collisions in space, debris creations, but we all have to do it in a profitable and repeatable way. And being able to standardize as much as possible whether it's on components, whether it's on our ground segment, whether it's on our legal frameworks. Being able to move from sort of one off bespoke to standardization is how we're going to be able to get there in a profitable way. So, the ground segment is a very big part of it. > Allegra Matarangas: Yeah. I would also say a big advantage that Astroscale and AWS have in working together is that we've supported Astroscale UK on the past two missions, so that being ADRAS-J and then also the ELSA-demonstration mission. So, with that data collection, it's already living in AWS, and now we have the advantage of being able to work together with the Astroscale team to do data processing and analytics and just analyzing large volumes of their satellite and spacecraft data, to be able to predict future anomalies like optimized mission planning and that's exactly what we're doing right now, is working with the larger Astroscale UK engineering team and looking at how things have been done for the past 12 to 24 months, and how we want to create a better system to launch in 2026 to support ELSA-M.
Maria Varmazis: That's amazing. I just love that that dialogue is so open and that that information is flowing so readily between the two sort of organizations here. That's just so fascinating to hear how sort of, you both are enabling progress in the other; it's just really, really cool to hear, you know, that Astroscale is pushing the boundaries of what AWS is providing and vice versa. I just-that's so fascinating, because we are so at the precipice of getting to that point of in space, servicing. We're almost there. It's just so neat to know that we're just a-it feels like we're just a few years away of that becoming much more of a regular thing.
Andrew Faiola: Just to bring it back down to Earth for a minute, and I'm sure Allegra will agree, you know, it hasn't been without its challenges, the relationship and the work that we've done, you know, between Astroscale and AWS. There have been hiccups along the way, but that's because we're doing something really novel and special and, ultimately, need to get it to routine and you don't do that without running into some bumps in the road. But I think, as you said, you know, the relationship is very open and transparent now and I think we're starting to see the fruits of all of those efforts. > Allegra Matarangas: So, as Andrew touched upon with the hard work that he and I and our greater organizations have put in in the past two years really in forming the AWS Astroscale partnership and relationship, I'm curious Andrew, outside of the topics that our teams are actively engaged on, what are you like most excited or hopeful for in AWS growing to be a stronger and bigger mission partner for Astroscale? What a great question. I think, you know, from the homework that I've done and the work that I have put in with you guys, I think there's a couple of things that I can see. I see that our ground segment teams are, today, having to spend a lot of their efforts on routine operations that ultimately I think can be better served with AWS's infrastructure itself. And then all of the things that we talked about around, you know, reduced latency, around reduced network complexity, around greater reliability of the ground segment, you know, ultimately, for me being responsible for business development, right, I need to be able to go to market with services that are economical for my customers. And the ground segment is a big component of what ultimately sort of spits out the other end as a price. And so, I think there's an opportunity and this is one of the things that I look forward to towards being able to rationalize the way we manage our ground segment that will make us more effective and competitive in this very nascent market where we're trying to convince people to take these services where today they don't yet have a compelling reason to do so. And so, I think AWS has a really important role to play with us towards making our services helping us to make our services that much more reliable and efficient, but also economical. > Allegra Matarangas: Yeah. It creates, I would say, like a bilateral relationship in like a flywheel really of us understanding, you know, what point, what threshold does Astroscale need to get at to make the services as competitive and marketable as possible to sell to commercial and the federal and government space, so it encourages a lot of collaboration in that aspect. So, we understand your goals. Absolutely, like I was saying, the closer we're working together the better AWS understands our challenges. There is no reason we should hide those, right? We want to be open with those, because that's how we're going to do these things better together and I'm convinced that we're, as you say Maria, we're sort of on the cusp of great things here and starting to get in to a position, right? We have a lot of work to do still, but you know, I see how we're going to get to make these kinds of services routine in the not too distant future. [ Music ]
Maria Varmazis: And that's it for "AWS in Orbit," Scaling Space Safety and Agility, with Astroscale. A special thanks to Andrew Faiola from Astroscale and Allegra Matarangas from AWS for joining us today. For additional resources from this episode and for more episodes in the "AWS in Orbit" series, checkout our show notes at space.n2k.com/aws. This episode was produced by Alice Carruth and powered by AWS. Our AWS producer is Laura Barber. Our associate producer is Liz Stokes. We're mixed by Elliot Peltzman and Tré Hester with original music by Elliot Peltzman. Our executive producer is Jennifer Eiben. Peter Kilpe is our publisher and I'm your host, Maria Varmazis. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time. [ Music ]
