AWS expands client offering with Ground Station availability

Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon’s prolific cloud arm, has launched the general availability of its Ground Station service, bolstering its customer offering with yet another powerful avenue for data access.

The AWS Ground Station will enable customers to easily access AWS satellites to download data in a cost-effective fashion, facilitating solution development at pace and without the need to commit to costly ground station contracts. 

“Satellite data offers customers a profound way to build applications that help humans explore space and improve life on Earth, but the cost and difficulty of building and maintaining the infrastructure necessary to downlink and process the data has historically been prohibitive for all but the most well-funded organizations,” said Shayn Hawthorne, General Manager of AWS Ground Station, in the firm’s press release.

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“The goal of AWS Ground Station is to make space communications ubiquitous and to make ground stations simple and easy to use, so that more organisations can derive insights from satellite data to help improve life on Earth and embark on deeper exploration and discovery in space. 

“Customers can rely on AWS Ground Station’s global footprint to downlink data when and where they need it, get timely data, and build new applications faster based on readily available satellite data, without having to buy, lease, and maintain complex and expensive infrastructure.”

AWS customers stand to save 80% of their ground station costs by leveraging on-demand antenna access time, paying only for what they need when they need it.