Amazon’s Project Kuiper Is More Than a Response to Starlink
August 18th, 2020Via: IEEE Spectrum:
“With Amazon, it’s a whole different ballgame,” says Zac Manchester, an assistant professor of aeronautics and astronautics at Stanford University. “The thing that makes Amazon different from SpaceX and OneWeb is they have so much other stuff going for them.” If Kuiper succeeds, Amazon can not only offer global satellite broadband access—it can include that access as part of its Amazon Web Services (AWS), which already offers resources for cloud computing, machine learning, data analytics, and more.
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“You could see Project Kuiper being a middleman for getting data into AWS,” says Manchester. “SpaceX owns the space segment, they can get data from point A to point B through space. Amazon can get your data through the network and into their cloud and out to end users.” There are plenty of tech start-ups and other companies that already do machine learning and other data-intensive operations in AWS and could make use of Kuiper to move their data.
