SAN FRANCISCO — Kongsberg Satellite Services and Amazon Web Services are expanding their alliance to speed up the flow of satellite data to customers.
KSAT announced plans July 30 to integrate AWS Ground Station capabilities into its network, which will include more than 200 antennas at 40 locations around the world.
“That can really minimize the time from the information captured by the satellite until it’s been brought to the user’s desk,” KSAT CEO Rolf Skatteboe told SpaceNews.
Now, KSAT delivers data from a tasked satellite to the cloud in 10 minutes. The goal is to shorten that timeframe to 10 minutes from tasking order to data available in the cloud.
“We see growing demand for that in the current market,” Skatteboe said. “Satellite information has to come faster, it has to be reliable, and it has to be at a reduced latency. KSAT and AWS together can make that happen.”
Since AWS entered the ground station business in 2019, the company has focused on helping customers deliver data to the cloud. As AWS capabilities have grown, customers have requested greater geographic diversity in the ground network, the ability to operate across orbital regimes and support for different bandwidths. AWS has focused on communicating with satellites in low-Earth orbit and offers X-band and S-band capability.
“We realized that by building a collaborative offering [with KSAT], we could provide customers more than either of us could provide alone,” said says Clint Crosier, AWS Aerospace and Satellite director and a retired U.S. Air Force major general. “This new collaboration with KSAT offers such a powerful range of operational flexibility, everything from access to the 24/7 Tromso [Norway] network operations center to launch and early operations technical expertise.”
Pricing Flexibility
In addition, the partnership also offers customers “pricing and billing flexibility and options,” Crosier said. “We are leaning more heavily on this partner-delivered model. We will still provide the ability to contract directly with AWS if customers prefer, but the greatest operational flexibility and pricing flexibility will come through this new partner collaboration.”
AWS shook up the ground station business when the cloud-services giant began offering cloud-based ground station as a service. KSAT began working with AWS in 2023 when it integrated AWS ground stations into its network.
Mission Enabler
Satellite operators who are new to the business or participating in university programs will benefit from the KSAT-AWS alliance because “together we can offer more efficient, better-value solutions than either could provide individually,” said Dan Adams, KSAT Inc. president and general manager. “This ends up being a powerful business enabler and mission enabler.”
Large operators also will benefit, Crosier said, because of the “obvious synergies with scope and scale and capacity and geographic diversity and cloud integration.”