We know a little more about Amazon's satellites

https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/05/we-finally-know-a-little-more-about-amazons-super-secret-satellites/

by pseudolus • 1 year ago

112 86 1 year ago

9dev• 1 year ago

The video of the satellite release looks really eerie; it’s got something biological to it, like an insect releasing its pods.

thinkingemote• 1 year ago

video: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/rajeev-badyal-807b3233_were-j...

ghaff• 1 year ago

To a first approximation, no one is going to forgo better Internet for whatever definition of better because they don’t like some billionaire’s politics or behavior.

perihelions2• 1 year ago

The sibling story has further details,

https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/04/a-rocket-launch-monday... ("A rocket launch Monday night may finally jump-start Amazon’s answer to Starlink")

ks20482• 1 year ago

Interesting bit towards the end: they need the FCC to extend their “network authorization”. And the FCC is of course now headed by a Musk/Trump ally.

ralfd2• 1 year ago

I dont expect there to be any problems for an extension. Carr is a market friendly pragmatist and Jeff Bezos is friendly towards Trump.

Musks influence into space seems limited, he couldnt prevent proposed budget cuts to NASA (and NASA is SpaceX biggest customer).

croes4• 1 year ago

So more satellites to block the view for astronomers.

tgsovlerkhgsel4• 1 year ago

Progress tends to have downsides. Highways and rail tracks destroy the environment and make areas hard to cross, but I think most people would acknowledge that on balance, having them them is a good thing.

In this case, the obvious solution would be to provide a small number of orbital observatories to the astronomy community for free or with heavily subsidized pricing.

croes4• 1 year ago

You could turn that around.

Progress in Earth bound astronomy has the downside of less satellite internet.

2OEH8eoCRo02• 1 year ago

What progress? I gain nothing from this. I have symmetrical cheap reliable fiber to my house.

timewizard4• 1 year ago

but I think most people would acknowledge that on balance, having them them is a good thing.

Of course it is. The next question is "is it a good thing to let a single owner completely control access to this resource?"

We've actually decided in the case of highways and rails, that no, it's not. There needs to be reasonable and non-discriminatory access to these resources otherwise the trade is not worthwhile. We actually have laws that are meant to enforce this.

the obvious solution would be to provide a small number of orbital observatories to the astronomy community for free or with heavily subsidized pricing.

Define the "astronomy community." Do we do first come first served or do we have a priority list? How do we handle disputes? Is it just US citizens or do we need to offer this to the entire world? What if the vendor fails to make good on their concessions? What sort of penalties should surround this system?

There's really nothing "obvious" about this.

thrance2• 1 year ago

Building a highways is not necessarily "progress". We really ought to stop calling "progress" the destruction of a natural habitat that we will never be able to rebuild, for the construction of a superflous road that will close in 15 years because of poor traffic anyway.

immibis2• 1 year ago

If Jeff has the right to jam my telescope with his satellite due to the lack of regulation, do I have the right to jam his satellite with my telescope due to the same lack of regulation, or does it only work one way?

93po2• 1 year ago

this is such a weird talking about that basically any real astronomer doesn't really care about, at all. it just comes across as "let's find any way to criticize elon possible" or "let's write clickbait based on a couple of terminally online comments on twitter". satellites are not blocking views, and astronomers are overwhelmingly in support of a healthy space industry, which includes satellite launches. the cutting edge of astronomy relies on satellites, it would be weird to be against them

mrshadowgoose3• 1 year ago

I am entirely convinced that absent LEO comsat constellations, people who espouse this sentiment would likely be whining about "useless astronomy taking money away from helping poor people".

If you genuinely care about the field of astronomy, rest assured that the same falling launch costs that have enabled LEO comsat constellations, will enable the launch of fleets of space-based telescopes.

timewizard4• 1 year ago

fleets of space-based telescopes.

Isn't one of the nice aspects of astronomy is that you can do quite a bit as an amateur with some decent equipment and a nice vantage point? What value does this fleet have to these people?

people who espouse this sentiment would likely be whining about "useless astronomy taking money away from helping poor people".

You've constructed a strawman for the purposes of gatekeeping; meanwhile, there very much is a reason to have a rational conversation about the trade offs of these large commercial ventures that impact literally the entire planet.

croes4• 1 year ago

Space based telescopes have limits Earth bound telescopes don’t have and they are easier to maintain

ks20482• 1 year ago

I wonder how competition will play out against StarLink. People just choose which billionaire they like better?

gus_massa2• 1 year ago

Nah, people will chose on price, reliability, price, speed, price and free gigas.

ceejayoz• 1 year ago

Ah, yes. A low barrier to entry market with many competitors, like ISPs, cell phone companies, etc.

Uh oh.

thrance2• 1 year ago

The myth of the rational consumer again, of homo economicus.

tgsovlerkhgsel4• 1 year ago

I wonder what "earth observation" opportunities there would be with such megaconstellations, from simply having a camera with a telephoto lens pointed down to a giant, sky-spanning Synthetic Aperture Radar utilizing multiple satellites.

Anything like that would explain the secrecy...

jvanderbot2• 1 year ago

Probably few. The US has excellent observers and comms sats by the dozens are not very big. It's true you can get some photos but the kind you're thinking of, where you can track vehicles in a meaningful way or something, has to be done by something closer to the hubble telescope (pointed backwards).

tgsovlerkhgsel4• 1 year ago

Even if it would just deliver 1 or even just 10 meter resolution, I would imagine the high revisit frequency would make it commercially valuable, and potentially also provide some value to military/intelligence groups because it would make it harder to hide activity through careful timing and the data would come with fewer secrecy requirements.

And I have no clue what is doable with SAR, but I'd imagine multiple satellites following each other would enable some interesting features, as it essentially gives you a giant antenna.

amy_petrik• 1 year ago

has to be done by something closer to the hubble telescope (pointed backwards). state of the art is about 2x diameter, with adaptive optics methodologies that avoid needing to polish a giga-mirror over several years

perihelions2• 1 year ago

The observation cadence could be game-changing. Instead of once-, twice- daily revisit times, in principle you could contemplate continuous observation, of large parts of the Earth, from LEO, with enough downstream bandwidth to make interesting use of all that data.

entropie• 1 year ago

Ive seen a video around 2005 about USA spy satellites/drones where they kind of disclosured what was possible at this time. Having a very wide area with realtime object/person tracking and multiple terrabytes of data every minute while beeing able to go back in time with all this features.

This all was like 20 years go. 20. 20!!

Than I see my upper consumer grade canon camera, a r6mkII with 70-200mm lens (mk1, 20 years old) that is able to make a photo of some dog in high speed motion, with a 1/800 shutter with 200mm while its dawn and you are still perfectly able to zoom into the photo and see and identify a midget [1]

1: https://i.imgur.com/9eE1zKe.png

Perceval2• 1 year ago

There are already commercial constellations on orbit doing EO and SAR: Planet Labs, Capella, IceEYE, Umbra, Maxar, and more.

bitmasher9• 1 year ago

It’s a 450km orbit. Cameras are good, but you’d need quite a bit of mass per satellite to identify anything of interest that isn’t already covered by other satellites. At a certain point photography becomes more a matter of optics (using lens to collect light) than anything else.

wmf• 1 year ago

Apparently you can't hide from Starshield so I'm guessing it's pretty good. https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/11/nro-chief-you-cant-h...

neuroelectron3• 1 year ago

The article doesn't even mention AWS, which I think is the obvious implication being overlooked here. AWS has Government and defense contracts, with DoD notably. This enables secure private communication outside of the internet across data centers (of which there are a lot) and of course, to any point on the Earth. The idea that this is for "underserved communities" is probably a sly nod to battlefield logistics.

parsimo20105• 1 year ago

They will undoubtedly sell some aspect of Kuiper through AWS. They already have IP addresses and DNS in the AWS product list, and they have all kinds of data transport services.

I don’t know if the government implication is as big as you think, as the US government has been doing secure satellite communications for decades and has already given SpaceX the contract for Starshield. So undoubtedly Kuiper would love a piece of the action but there is already competition and Kuiper is a bit late to the game.

nine_k2• 1 year ago

already given SpaceX the contract for Starshield

Many key things the government buys need to have more than one independent source. This way Kuiper may be just in time.

Perceval2• 1 year ago

Space is an AWS region, just like AWS has terrestrial regions. The AWS space region is named Pigeon.

neuroelectron3• 1 year ago

I didn't know about Starshield. I thought Starlink was supposed to be neutral.

dboreham2• 1 year ago

Quick note that post-Snowden: no it doesn't. There's no such thing as "secure private communication" from magic wires.

XorNot• 1 year ago

End to end encryption has not been broken.

lxgr7• 1 year ago

This enables secure private communication outside of the internet across data centers

How so? I'd imagine the datacenter terminal side downlink to be much more easily tappable than fiberoptics.

There are advantages in latency and potentially availability, but even there I would imagine fiber to win in an adversarial active jamming scenario.

nine_k2• 1 year ago

easily tappable

I suppose in any realistic scenario we should assume that the enemy may be listening to all our communication at all times. This is the assumption behind such daily things as WPA3, SSH, TLS.

Jamming is a much more serious concern.

SEJeff4• 1 year ago

FHSS[1] has made jamming difficult in US military communications for decades. It doesn’t make it impossible but jamming the entire spectrum is nearly impossible at scale for almost everyone. At best it would affect small areas until the US sent rf seeking missiles (HARM are designed for this) at the jammer source. Also note that modern satcom like Starlink uses AESA digital phased array antennas much like a F35’s radar. It’s so much more complex than legacy analog stuff.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency-hopping_spread_spe...

immibis2• 1 year ago

Terminal side downlink?

With some satellites, you just point a dish at the satellite and get the same data everyone else gets. With more advanced ones, you have to be in roughly the same place as the intended recipient because the satellite has different antennas pointed in different directions. In either case, it's presumably encrypted data so what good is intercepting it?

nkrisc3• 1 year ago

Say a couple perpetually quarrels about who's going to do the dishes. To prevent further squabbles they decide to split the chores on weekly, alternating basis. Everything works well, until one of the spouses falls ill. The dishes pile up in the kitchen sink, but the other spouse does not feel responsible for the mess. It’s not their turn. And yes, there's nobody to blame.

And this is where accountability sinks distinguish two different kinds of people: some will (rightfully) realize that it is not their responsibility and no one is to blame, so they will do nothing. Others will see also see that it is not their responsibility and no one is to blame, but they will also see that it will become their problem regardless of responsibility or blame, and so they do something about it.

Unfortunately the latter is often not rewarded or even actively discouraged or punished in corporate settings.

parsimo20105• 1 year ago

I think you’re posting in the wrong comments section

Gud• 1 year ago

You are in the wrong comment section, but thanks for the thoughtful comment!

nkrisc3• 1 year ago

I definitely am.

notepad0x903• 1 year ago

The defense angle us civilians are probably not seeing is important. One big advantage for example is they're hard to take down.

Let's say there's a war with China, one of the first things the PLA will do is take down any US government controlled satellites. The normal big ones you can shoot down but thousands of them that can be replaced within a day, not so much. The PLA would also be giving out their launch positions for retaliatory attacks.

Let's presume the PLA has effective radio and GPS jamming tech, one solution is to use cameras on satellites for positioning and laser as well as frequency hopping satellite radio comms. Small, easily replaceable constellation satellites are ideal.

fragmede3• 1 year ago

Kessler syndrome seems to be the MAD solution there though.

notepad0x903• 1 year ago

in times of actual war, i doubt anyone in the military would care. The result is undesirable but there won't be any threat to life as a result, and there is always a chance the debris problem can be solved in the near future (just shoot it all down! lol)

We know a little more about Amazon's satellites

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