AWS in Orbit: Space Data and Resiliency.

[ Music ]

>> Maria Varmazis: Hi, I'm Maria Varmazis, host of the "T-Minus Space Daily" podcast. And this is "AWS in Orbit: Space Data and Resiliency". We're bringing you the first installment of the AWS in Orbit podcast series at the 39th Space Symposium. In this episode, I'll be speaking to representatives from Hawkeye 360, Effectual, and AWS Aerospace and Satellite about the power of partnerships in the space industry to ensure space data resilience.

[ Music ]

Hi, I'm Maria Varmazis, host of "T-Minus Space Daily". And this is "AWS in Orbit: Space Data and Resiliency". Okay, so we are bringing you the first installment of the AWS in Orbit podcast series at the 39th Space Symposium. In this episode, I'll be speaking to representatives from Hawkeye 360, Effectual, and AWS Aerospace and Satellite about the power of partnerships in the space industry to ensure space resilience. Welcome, everyone. It's so nice to meet you all in person. All right.

>> Jerry Meleski: Likewise.

>> Maria Varmazis: Excellent to have you all here. So let's start with some introductions. So why don't we start with you, Jerry.

>> Jerry Meleski: Yes, so my name is Jerry Meleski. I'm the senior vice president of Strategic Technology and Products at Hawkeye 360. My team is responsible for innovation, including our product roadmaps, capabilities roadmaps, R&D, and things like that. And we're real excited to be here to talk with you today. I've been with Hawkeye for two years now. Before that I was with Kratos [phonetic] for 20 years and then I served in other aerospace defense companies for the rest of my career. And I won't mention how many years that was; [Maria laughs] so but thank you very much. We're very honored to be here with you today.

>> Maria Varmazis: Thank you for joining us. Tim, you're next.

>> Tim Sylvester: Thank you, Tim Sylvester, field CTO at Effectual. Effectual is a team of builders, engineers, architects. We live largely in the software and cloud space, working close with AWS with customers like Hawkeye to build and enable scalability and, to your point, resilience and basically stability in the places that they want to operate. I've been with the organization four years, prior to that, many stints between startups, and hedge funds, and financial services, but always lived in technology and engineering, so.

>> Maria Varmazis: Hmm. Excellent. Thank you very much. And last but not least, Jeff.

>> Jeff Kratz: Well, good morning, good afternoon. My name is Jeff Kratz, and I get the privilege as VP of our Worldwide Public Sector Industry teams to look after our global security national defense business, health, education, non-private, and of course, ANS. Wonderful to be here.

>> Maria Varmazis: Thank you so much, excellent intros, gentlemen. Thank you so much for that. All right, so let's set the stage for this excellent story. So we'll start with you, Jerry. So tell us a bit about Hawkeye 360 first.

>> Jerry Meleski: Yes, so Hawkeye 360 is a commercial owner/operator of a fairly large satellite constellation. Our mission is to detect, geolocate, and track RF signatures around the globe, whether it's land, sea, or air. And our customers, which generally are government agencies --

>> Maria Varmazis: Yes.

>> Jerry Meleski: Are very interested in things like homeland security, defense, conservation, and sometimes law enforcement, so things like border protection, border patrol, and so forth. And so our data we offer as a turnkey service. So we have the constellation, we do all the collections, we manage and operate the satellites, and then at the end we offer the data that we collect to our customers as a service. And it's great for them because some of the customers are countries who have varying degrees of capabilities. Some are very sophisticated customers like our own country here in the United States, Japan, and the Five Eyes that, you know, were kind of augmenting their capabilities. Others are countries who do not have any type of space program or core competency whatsoever, and so we're basically offering them an entire space-based capability, and then handing them the answer, you know, kind of for a service.

>> Maria Varmazis: Fantastic. I was going to ask what kind of challenges are your customers facing, what do they help solve for; you kind of addressed that already, so that's great.

>> Jerry Meleski: Okay.

>> Maria Varmazis: You anticipated my question. That's awesome. All right. I'm curious how Effectual comes in here with these challenges that Hawkeye 360 customers are facing.

>> Jerry Meleski: It's a -- I mean, it's a good question. I think laying into that we are really working hand in hand with Hawkeye. It's not as much a "we work for" as we work with. We partner with Hawkeye to build some of the infrastructure, some of the capability around where they build products in enablement [phonetic]. Their real skill is getting those satellites in the sky, observing the Earth from the sky, tracking, putting intelligence on top of that data. But in terms of the bits and bytes that live underneath that, the platform, the infrastructure, that's really where we stand.

>> Maria Varmazis: Hmm.

>> Jerry Meleski: We help get those things out of the way so Hawkeye can do their business --

>> Maria Varmazis: Yes.

>> Jerry Meleski: And we work closely with AWS as well using the services, building upon the scaffolding that they've built, and really kind of helping them figure out what they need to do today, where they're going tomorrow, and planning for that whole journey.

>> Maria Varmazis: Fantastic. Thank you so much. So let's talk a little bit about the partnership that we've been talking about here and also, AWS, of course; so how Effectual together with AWS worked to help create a solution for Hawkeye 360 customers, so to enable innovation. So can we talk about that? Maybe Tim, maybe you start with that.

>> Tim Sylvester: Sure. So AWS has built a number of services that live in the cloud. And that has really changed the posture of building, of innovating, of iterating on concepts, and ideas, and technology to a near real-time capability.

>> Maria Varmazis: Yes.

>> Tim Sylvester: And Hawkeye has taken that premise from what has historically been in aerospace weeks, months, years to build new products, to get new platforms in space. I mean, we can mention the six satellites that you guys just got up --

>> Jerry Meleski: Yes, absolutely.

>> Maria Varmazis: Yes, yes.

>> Tim Sylvester: In the last week.

>> Jerry Meleski: Yes.

>> Tim Sylvester: And that is really changing the pace of engagement, of capability of products. And we're helping work on the backend of that with Hawkeye, but we're all using AWS services.

>> Maria Varmazis: Yes.

>> Tim Sylvester: And AWS builds those tools, and those capabilities, and platforms, and services that we then bring to Hawkeye so they can iterate really quickly on data analytics, on intelligence, on customer asks --

>> Maria Varmazis: Hmm.

>> Tim Sylvester: Instead of having to build everything from ground up.

>> Maria Varmazis: Yes.

>> Tim Sylvester: Even within the regulated secure space --

>> Maria Varmazis: Yes.

>> Tim Sylvester: It's still very much a capable, doable, high-speed resilient function.

>> Maria Varmazis: Fantastic. Jerry, yes, if you have anything to add.

>> Jerry Meleski: Yes, so I wanted just to add, you know, a lot of the requirements for our system are driven by this very diverse set of customers, you know, around the world. They need things like security, they need ubiquitous access, they need as close to real-time access as -- they can possibly get from when we detect, you know, signatures to when they actually are delivered the data. So the cloud sits right in the middle of all of that, allowing this scalable, ubiquitous access with security build-in and the flexibility to kind of move processing around and, you know, actually can redesign our processing channel almost on the fly --

>> Maria Varmazis: Yes.

>> Tim Sylvester: Based on the cloud tools. We also have a very rich set of analytics around our data so that we're not just providing raw data to our customers, we're providing, you know, geolocations, very precise geolocations and AI/ML based algorithms to actually track certain entities like ships and so forth around. So all of that requires a very robust and rich infrastructure and architecture. And that's really where AWS, Effectual, and Hawkeye kind of come together and really work collaboratively on not only building that architecture, but evolving it and the roadmap for it and so forth going forward. So it really is like the right set of tools for the job.

>> Maria Varmazis: That's awesome. Jeff, this feels like the great time for you to jump in.

>> Jeff Kratz: Yes.

>> Maria Varmazis: Tell us a bit more about how AWS enables partnerships and collaborations like this.

>> Jeff Kratz: Well, it's incredibly exciting times. And so at AWS, we start with the customer and we work our way backwards. And these are the times that we are seeing all of our customers really reimagine what their mission is.

>> Maria Varmazis: Hmm.

>> Tim Sylvester: We're seeing governments act like startups. We see educational institutions rethinking how to go ahead and teach or do research --

>> Maria Varmazis: Hmm.

>> Tim Sylvester: Hospitals how to better serve their patients that are out there. And critical as the backbone against that --

>> Maria Varmazis: Yes.

>> Tim Sylvester: Is our partners. It's absolutely critical. It's been from day one when we started the business. And in particular for ANS, we're seeing reimagining now of what space missions are. And these are like super exciting times. If I think about where the business is going overall -- I mean across the globe, we are anticipating that there will be at least three times as many satellites launched in the next ten years.

>> Maria Varmazis: Amazing.

>> Tim Sylvester: We just heard that nuance that [inaudible] --

>> Jerry Meleski: Right.

>> Tim Sylvester: Congratulations, Jerry --

>> Jerry Meleski: Thank you.

>> Tim Sylvester: On that.

>> Jerry Meleski: Thank you.

>> Tim Sylvester: World Economic Forum and McKinsey just published a report where in the next ten years, the space industry, in particular for cloud, will be over $1.8 trillion. And 70 governments now have space agencies. And so there's an amazing momentum that's going. And within that, we need to continue to invest in the long-term success of our customers via our partners. So how are we doing that?

>> Maria Varmazis: Yes. [Laughs]

>> Tim Sylvester: We're doing it in a couple different ways. One is we're continuing to invest in the services in the infrastructure. We have new regions that we have announced in Thailand, Malaysia, New Zealand. Couple of weeks ago, we announced that we are going to build a new region in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Mexico as well, as well as extending the cloud into new form factors based on what our customers are asking, our snow family of products --

>> Maria Varmazis: Hmm.

>> Tim Sylvester: Outpost connecting our customers' data centers to our cloud, as well as them building additional services, especially security, generated AI, and other parts. So one way we're continuing to invest is that long-term success. And in fact, if you're to look at the storage now, we have over 100 times the storage than there was around the globe 30 years ago. And our data centers right now if you were to count them all up are three to four times more than our nearest competitors now. But that's just infrastructure investment. Then we invest in our partners. And we're doing quite a bit in terms of training our partners on new generative AI technologies, Bedrock [inaudible], SageMaker, new ways to look at storage on short and long term with S3 and Glacier to lower the costs for different missions that are there --

>> Maria Varmazis: Yes.

>> Tim Sylvester: As well as then the engagement with our partners of doing mapping. And we've got a great example here of two getting together to help solve for our customers faster missions.

>> Maria Varmazis: And do we see partnerships like this very often? Yes.

>> Tim Sylvester: We see partnerships like this around the globe.

>> Maria Varmazis: Yes.

>> Tim Sylvester: In fact I was just in Australia working with an amazing startup, just working on better preparing the fire marshals and others to respond to brushfires --

>> Maria Varmazis: Wow.

>> Tim Sylvester: A really big issue --

>> Maria Varmazis: Yes.

>> Tim Sylvester: That's occurring. But they're looking for new partners to expand their business in Idaho, in Oregon, in California.

>> Maria Varmazis: Yes.

>> Tim Sylvester: I was in the Nordics and our ISV partners were saying, "Who's a good SI? We don't have the services needed. And what we've got will get us 80% there, but we need that 20%."

>> Maria Varmazis: Yes.

>> Tim Sylvester: And so what we're trying to do is better map our partners with our customers around the globe to accelerate this digital innovation that's happening.

>> Maria Varmazis: That's fantastic. Thank you for that. Gentlemen, I want to turn to you for a second. If -- for any other companies that are trying to embark on a collaboration like what you've done --

>> Tim Sylvester: Yes.

>> Maria Varmazis: Any takeaways or advice for them?

>> Jerry Meleski: Yes, I'll start with --

>> Maria Varmazis: Yes, go ahead, Jerry.

>> Jerry Meleski: You know, in terms of the amount of data that we collect and analyze, you know, so like the RF emitter use case, you know, the RF emitters aren't on all the time, and so you have to basically -- and our satellites are flying in low Earth orbit, and you have to have enough of a persistence to -- you know, to kind of catch the target you're looking for.

>> Maria Varmazis: Yes. Yes.

>> Jerry Meleski: And I'll use an example here really quickly. So you know, a few years ago -- there are these economic exclusion zones around the world, and the Galapagos islands is a international treasury of fish and protected species and so forth. And there's a boundary in the water around the Galapagos Islands.

>> Maria Varmazis: Yes, yes, yes.

>> Jerry Meleski: And we kind of caught the Chinese fishing fleet turning off their transmitters that say, "My ship is here," and kind of popping in and taking a few casts and coming back, you know, in terms of that exclusion zone. So that's the kind of -- but you have to persistently be looking in order to capture that sort of thing, especially when the ships go dark and things like that. And so what that generates is a massive volume of data.

>> Maria Varmazis: Yes.

>> Jerry Meleski: And not just our data, but our data is generally correlated with, you know, what's called "multi-end", you know, Earth observation, you know, so imagery, SAR, and so forth.

>> Maria Varmazis: Yes.

>> Jerry Meleski: So we're talking about a colossal amount of data. And that's where the tools -- the rich tool set of, you know, the Amazon services come in in terms of storing and archiving all that data. We actually have all the data we've ever collected from our very first satellites --

>> Maria Varmazis: Oh, wow.

>> Jerry Meleski: Back in 2019.

>> Maria Varmazis: For real. [Laughs]

>> Jerry Meleski: We still have it. It's like a little museum. And the cool thing about that is that as we develop new algorithms, we can actually go back in time in the archive and reprocess the data and find new insights, or we can actually, you know, kick the tires on our algorithms without having to do live collects and take live capacity offline to do testing. So there's a lot of benefits to having a massive amount of data. But again, to manage that data is a big job and requires -- you know, and there's the security aspects in addition to that. And that's really where, you know, the cloud service is, and the services around that really help us out a lot.

>> Tim Sylvester: Yes, and --

>> Maria Varmazis: Yes, anything to add, Tim; yes.

>> Tim Sylvester: Yes, and I mean, that layers in a really interesting concept. And I think Jeff, you mentioned this, thinking about the customer first.

>> Jeff Kratz: Yes.

>> Maria Varmazis: Yes.

>> Tim Sylvester: Anytime you're working with a partner, whether it's us or somebody else -- and this is one thing that AWS really instills in the program and I mentioned us being more partners and kind of a customer transaction, is because we'll work with Hawkeye and figure out what is your end customer looking for, how can you -- how can we enable you to go solve that mission, that ask, that request --

>> Maria Varmazis: Hmm.

>> Tim Sylvester: And not just look at it as a, "Oh, you need to store your data." No, what are you going to do with that data, are you going to go and reanalyze that data, do you have a cost concern, do you have a performance concern, what is the -- sort of the mission parameter, what is the end goal, and then working to get there; because we could look at all of these problems in sort of myopic views where it's just a small kind of targeted solution, or we could think about where are we going with this, how do we want to look at this in the future, how can we leverage that? And as long as you keep that north star together, it tends to be much more successful.

>> Maria Varmazis: Fantastic, yes. Anything you wanted to add to that, Jeff?

>> Jeff Kratz: Well, I think that, you know, from that perspective, grounded on resiliency, grounded on security, those are just fundamentals --

>> Maria Varmazis: Yes.

>> Jeff Kratz: That are there. The data is continuing to grow in so many different wonderful ways. And Jerry, I'm inspired by, you know, your experience because I think about the insights now that you can go back to look forward on in so many different new permutations.

>> Jerry Meleski: Yes.

>> Jeff Kratz: And from that perspective, I think we're going to be able to solve some of the world's hardest problems that are out there all collectively together.

>> Maria Varmazis: That's fantastic.

>> Jerry Meleski: Absolutely. You know, and I just want to add something that Jeff said in terms of the security aspect. So we operate, you know, within what's called the "GovCloud" --

>> Maria Varmazis: Yes.

>> Jerry Meleski: Of AWS. So if you -- a couple years ago, we had to make a major transition from I'll say the commercial cloud to the GovCloud. AWS and Effectual helped us make that transition. So we now have this kind of secure bubble that we operate in that's basically recognized by the US government as being safe, and that's really important. But as we expand into different countries, they also have governments that -- you know, that want a secure environment, but they also want sovereignty over that environment.

>> Maria Varmazis: Interesting; yes.

>> Jerry Meleski: They kind of want their -- they don't want the US GovCloud so much as they want the name the country GovCloud. And this is an area as we scale and Jeff kind of hit on that -- you know, that we can continue to work together with given the nations the sovereignty they're looking for and the security and their protection, and actually port the same architecture that we have and reuse it across these different clouds, if you will, and provide what these customers are really looking for; and that really helps us as a business to scale our value proposition and business value.

>> Tim Sylvester: You know, Jerry, you hit an important part. Each station is going through their own definitions of what "sovereign" means.

>> Maria Varmazis: Hmm.

>> Jerry Meleski: And a lot of laws were created before cloud even existed.

>> Maria Varmazis: Sure; yes.

>> Jerry Meleski: And so there's a lot of effort going underway around the globe, different nations rewriting laws, getting educated in conjunction with AWS, with our partners, and more. And so we needed to provide additional options for our partners and for our customers, and that's why we announced Sovereign Cloud, which is a dedicated cloud to help address the needs, for instance, in the European Union. And we're continuing to innovate based on what our partners and our customers are asking for. And that actually came up -- in fact, if you look at all of our services, 90% of them are developed based on what the feedback is; the last ten percent, anecdotally, is where we look at Stockholm to Sydney to San Francisco and we do the mapping. But it was out of that that we were hearing governments wanting to know more about Sovereignty, and what can I store, is it data in rest, is it data in motion --

>> Maria Varmazis: Hmm.

>> Jerry Meleski: Is it data in archive, is it data in processing? And each government is a little different. And we're continuing to innovate with our partners to help address those around the globe as each government walks through their digital transformation.

>> Maria Varmazis: Absolutely. I mean, that's such a sensitive and important area. And I imagine it's hugely reassuring to your customers to know that that competence is there, and that sensitivity to that issue is there. I can absolutely see that. Gentlemen, I know we're coming up on time, and I've taken up a lot of your time today, and it's been a pleasure speaking with you all. I want to make sure that I ask you all a wrap-up question. So I'd love to hear about long-term vision. If anyone wants to share that, I'll -- if anyone wants to raise their hand and talk about. You want to go ahead? Yes, we'll -- how about everybody take that one --

[ Inaudible ]

A long-term vision. Jerry, why don't you start? [Laughs]

>> Jerry Meleski: Yes, I think all three of us would like to talk about that.

>> Maria Varmazis: Yes, absolutely.

>> Jerry Meleski: Like -- yes so --

>> Maria Varmazis: Why don't you start?

>> Jerry Meleski: And like I mentioned in my introduction, you know, I'm looking at capability roadmaps for Hawkeye and what is the product market fit, the customer value fit going forward? So very futuristic thinking, you know, going on there. And as we evolve, it's not just about getting more and more satellites into space --

>> Maria Varmazis: Yes.

>> Jerry Meleski: It's really as -- you know, as a commercial company, cost is a major factor, so we have to optimize, you know, that space real estate the best way we can. So that means, you know, there's a lot of handshake that goes on between space and ground. And like I said, we're looking at things like onboard processing, you know, and kind of changing that processing chain up maybe dynamically, you know, maybe one pass we're doing onboard processing and then another pass we're doing all the processing on the ground like we do today. So we're constantly evolving the CONOP and the use case of our constellation. The beauty of having a vertically-integrated system is we get -- the world is our oyster, you know, everything from the sensor in space, to the handoff, to the S3 bucket to the customers of our data is in our control, and we can kind of re-architect and control the data flow and how all that happens. So we are thinking ahead about how we leverage the very rich toolset we have and kind of offer a more, you know, high-value proposition to our customers as we evolve.

>> Maria Varmazis: Fantastic. Go ahead, Tim.

>> Tim Sylvester: And it's interesting the -- sort of the chain of events that has brought us to this conversation; and not just this conversation, but where we are in technology. You talked about space pulling signals, space pulling photos and that turns into data, and that data turns into intelligence and insights. And it took so long to get to the point where we could get intelligence and insights, and now we're moving faster to real-time intelligence and insights instead of just observation and analytics.

>> Maria Varmazis: Hmm.

>> Tim Sylvester: So it's a really interesting time where the tooling from AWS and the speed of innovation with something like Hawkeye enables us to build these powerful intelligence tools so we can make better decisions in real time. And that's going to be a fascinating time to live through.

>> Jerry Meleski: Yes, and I just want to foot stomp what Tim just said, because when Hawkeye started out -- this is part of the evolution, it was all about data as a service, data, data, data. Well, we're past that. The customers are like, "Thanks for the data, but I want information. I want answers and I want them fast." You know, and so we're trying to close that loop with, you know, the barriers of latency. You know, we're turning every knob to get our latency down, our revisit up, the speed of the data processing up. You know, so things like accessing your data and all the little things that add to latency we have to optimize to get the customer the data the quick -- not data the quickest, but the answers --

>> Maria Varmazis: Information.

>> Jerry Meleski: The information --

>> Maria Varmazis: Yes, information, yes.

>> Jerry Meleski: Quickly. So that's a major trend of our innovation is, you know, data as a service yesterday, tomorrow it's analytics and information as a service.

>> Maria Varmazis: That insight.

>> Tim Sylvester: The insights.

>> Maria Varmazis: Yes, insight, not data.

>> Tim Sylvester: Insights.

>> Jerry Meleski: I love that. That's so great.

>> Maria Varmazis: Yes.

>> Jerry Meleski: Yes.

>> Maria Varmazis: And Jeff, over to you.

>> Jeff Kratz: You know, I think grounded on resiliency, grounded on security, grounded on innovation, I am optimistic that we can solve some of the biggest challenges that this planet is being faced with right now. When I think about the AWS, we've got the broadest and deepest cloud services stack, wrapped with the security that's there in innovation, [inaudible] based on what our customers and partners are asking us to do. Our partners are leaning in, we're leaning in, our customers are leaning. And I think that we've got the potential to solve some of the biggest challenges. I was talking with our German team just the other day and the German rail, interestingly enough, has 21,000 miles of rail. They're already leaning in with the partners to take geospatial data as well as other data inputs to look at how do they continue to reduce the carbon footprint --

>> Maria Varmazis: Hmm.

>> Jeff Kratz: Across Germany to build a better life for their citizens. I mean, that's part of what government's responsibility is. And you start looking at that and as just one of a myriad examples around the globe of how we can make this world a better place collectively, and I am very optimistic that whether it's in the Galapagos, in Germany, Singapore, in the sea, in the sky that we can solve some of the hardest issues that we collectively are all facing. I'm very optimistic.

>> Maria Varmazis: I love that optimism. I share that optimism. Gentlemen, it's been a joy speaking with you all. Jerry, Tim, Jeff, thank you so much.

>> Jeff Kratz: Thank you.

>> Tim Sylvester: Thank you for that. Our pleasure.

>> Jerry Meleski: Thank you.

[ Music ]

>> Maria Varmazis: This episode was produced by Alice Carruth and Laura Barber for AWS Aerospace and Satellite. Mixing by Eliot Peltzman and Tre Hester, with original music and sound design by Elliott Peltzman. Our associate producer is Liz Stokes. Our executive producer is Jenn Eiben. Our VP is Brandon Karpf. And I'm Maria Varmazis. Thanks for watching.

[ Music ]