CyberWire Daily - AWS in Orbit: Building Opportunity with Axiom Space. [AWS in Orbit]

Episode Date: September 2, 2024

You can learn more about AWS in Orbit at space.n2k.com/aws. Our guests today are Jason Aspiotis, Global Director, In-Space Data & Security at Axiom Space and Jay Naves, Sr. Solutions Architect at AWS Aerospace & Satellite Solutions. AWS in Orbit is a podcast collaboration between N2K Networks and AWS to offer listeners an in-depth look at the transformative intersection of cloud computing, space technologies, and generative AI. Remember to leave us a 5-star rating and review in your favorite podcast app. Miss an episode? Sign-up for our weekly intelligence roundup, Signals and Space, and you’ll never miss a beat. And be sure to follow T-Minus on LinkedIn and Instagram. Selected Reading AWS Aerospace and Satellite Audience Survey We want to hear from you! Please complete our short survey. It’ll help us get better and deliver you the most mission-critical space intel every day. Want to hear your company in the show? You too can reach the most influential leaders and operators in the industry. Here’s our media kit. Contact us at [e-mail] to request more info. Want to join us for an interview? Please send your pitch to [e-mail] and include your name, affiliation, and topic proposal. T-Minus is a production of N2K Networks, your source for strategic workforce intelligence. © 2023 N2K Networks, Inc. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Thank you for watching. Welcome to AWS In Orbit. I'm Maria Varmaezis. We're working with AWS to bring you an in-depth look at the transformative intersection of cloud computing, space technologies, and generative AI. On AWS in Orbit, we're exploring not just what's possible, but what's meaningful in the realm of space and cloud innovation. Welcome to AWS in Orbit, Episode 10, Building Opportunity with Axiom, Enterprise IT Technologies on Orbit, and Mission Control from Anywhere. NASA plans to retire and deorbit the International Space Station in 2030. But once the ISS is gone, what will take the place of this vitally important floating lab space?

Well, the commercial space industry has been hard at work, floating lab space. Well, the commercial space industry has been hard at work creating private space stations to not just fill the capability gap left behind by the ISS, but also to expand on humanity's capabilities in orbit. One of the companies leading the charge here is Axiom Space, whose Axiom Station is planned to launch in 2026. To learn more about Axiom Station and the incredible enterprise IT capabilities at work right now to make Axiom's vision a reality, we'll be hearing from Jason Aspiotis, Global Director of In-Space Data and Security at Axiom Space. And we'll be joined by Jay Naves from AWS, who explains how AWS capabilities are enhancing many of the boundary-breaking projects and technologies that Axiom is building.

I am Jason Aspiotis. In my role, I have the pleasure and honor, really, to work on some really interesting projects revolving around the space station we're building. So, AXIS building, the world's first commercial space station. I was actually brought in to help both develop the infrastructure capabilities of the space station, but to also give them a purpose, right? The rough goal is, you know, by 2040, can we have a sitting space with, let's say,

100 people living, working, and thriving in that environment as permanent or long-term residents of that large infrastructure? It's going to be a space station that's probably 10, 20 times the size of what we're building today. Potentially, part of the facility will be a centrifugal infrastructure that allows for simulated gravity for the people to be able to live comfortably with large parts of the station being microgravity enabled to leverage microgravity for in-space manufacturing and in-space research and the rest of space station

addressing variety of use cases and new markets like orbital data centers like in-space manufacturing and construction right so using large-scale platforms and robotics and new techniques around manufacturing, whether 3D printing, other forms of air-to-air manufacturing, in-space welding, for example, to build next-generation infrastructure in space to help assemble next-generation spacecraft

that will someday take humans from Earth orbit to Mars. The vision of a city in space is not just about the people, it's about the work they do around data, infrastructure, research, manufacturing new materials in space to bring back to ground to infuse some terrestrial economies, but also constructing new things in space that we will use to further our exploration scientific aspirations of species between here mars and beyond all right so it becomes a economic nexus that helps drive not just commerce but also more exploration more human endeavors beyond first vicinity yeah and the timing is fantastic also because, because when you talk to an ordinary person or a space nerd, whichever, and when you mention space stations, everyone's mind goes to the ISS.

And with 2030 coming up pretty fast, a lot of people are wondering what is going to be next for humanity's permanent presence in space. How does that work into the vision of the ISS going away eventually, and then Axiom Station going to be doing so much more than what the ISS can do right now? Timing is paramount. The ISS has been a great foundation in terms of driving a lot of the innovation and research, especially around Mike Gravity and the benefits of Mike Gravity for development of new pharmaceuticals and materials, but also the benefits of having a space station as sort of a base of operations to learn how to live and do research and work in space. So as far as timing wise, I think we're right there. And the ISS retiring, that's something that obviously is

part of our plans. And we will be in sync with ISS as they finalize their quote-unquote retirement plans. And we have a plan ourselves on how we do it as smoothly as possible. But that's just part of the transition from government-built, government-owned, government-operated, human-rated large-scale infrastructures now commercially operated,

privately owned, privately built infrastructure like what we're doing. And that's why the economics is really important, right? Because if there weren't the economic foundations to launch stuff at lower costs, then all this wouldn't be possible. So there's other things at play as well, as far as timing, what's happening in the world of space communications and mesh networking or outer net, as some people call it, that's also sort of a foundational block upon which now you can sort of intersect what's happening in that part of the space ecosystem, independent of space stations. in sort of a parallel. And then if you intersect the two, you look, huh,

there's a clear applicability of space stations in the context of a platform for orbiting data centers to support this other emerging foundation of next-generation mesh network and communications. So with the future of post-ISS, post-government-supported

commercial space stations fast approaching, commercial providers are working to shore up the infrastructure that the new stations are going to need. Let's add another voice here to tell us more on that. My name is Jay Naves. I'm a solutions architect for Amazon Web Services.

I've worked with Axiom on behalf of AWS for over two years. So tell me a bit about how Axiom on behalf of AWS for over two years. So tell me a bit about how Axiom uses AWS to optimize the work that Axiom is doing to build infrastructure for the next generation Axiom Space Station. Axiom has this vision to enable customers in space with own orbit data storage, compute infrastructure. And it turns out that that's something that AWS is really good at. And AWS is also really good at innovating on behalf of their customers. So we took it upon ourselves to start innovating and trying to figure out a way to help our customer Axiom in their goal of building a space station to replace the ISS. In a precursor to them beginning development of the space station,

we partnered with Axiom to enable them a path forward for providing edge compute and data analytics storage capabilities on a space station. And so to that end, in April of 2022, we launched an edge compute device. It's called the AWS Snowcone. Anyone of our customers can go to the AWS console and order one of these devices. our customers can go to the AWS console and order one of these devices. We launched a snow cone to the space station with the initial intent of running a demonstration that proved to Axiom that on-orbit edge compute could start providing capabilities that a space station provider would need.

The first demonstration simply took photos of demonstrations of ongoing astronaut activity during the Axiom AX-1 mission, which was the first all-private astronaut mission to the space station. So we took all these images that the astronauts provided, and we did object recognition. We inferenced these images looking for proprietary things that weren't supposed to be provided publicly. All these demonstrations occur on space station. They send them all down to Earth, and then they have people look at these and vet these images before they release them. So we're trying to do this in an automated fashion that leverage machine learning, neat technologies that were now readily available for compute devices on orbit. Since then, we've been through four other demonstrations with other Axiom customers, And we continue to do these demonstrations today.

We've heard a bit now from Jay on how AWS solutions and capabilities enhance the work that Axiom and its customers are doing to push the boundaries of what's possible in space. All that and more will be happening aboard Axiom Station in the future. So let's go back to Jason at Axiom for more on Axiom Station itself. So Jason, when we think of space stations, I can't help but think of the Axiom crews that have been to the International Space Station several times. And I'm thinking about the impact of a commercial space station and what that'll mean for future private astronaut missions and international collaborations. What would these future missions and collaborations look like?

Would things change significantly? Would they be sort of similar to now? Do we know what that vision would be? We are using the ISS for these precursor missions. And part of why we're doing that is to run as a company, to do routine commercial human spaceflight. And that's an important piece of us just growing as a company, right?

And we've done three and continue to do that because it's great learning, but also the other piece of that is unlocking new demands and new use cases for human spaceflight that in some of it is going to continue to be government of course you know nasa is going to be a perpetual driver for human spaceflight so our key partners

like isa jackson etc but there's also emerging governments and countries that have tremendous amount of interest in how they get to be part of this human evolution and growth in the space domain. And a lot of these countries are investing in satellite capabilities, other kinds of things related to space, but they also have an interest in growing their human spaceflight programs because they see the synergies between the two, right? There's a lot of things that connect all of them the transportation the infrastructure the competencies um all the logistics associated with launching satellites and launching humans and having all that operate in a safe way in space there's a lot of commonality between all those two and it's all part of the same economy right space-based economy so as the space-based economy grows to 1 trillion 1.5 2 trillion in next few decades, more and more countries obviously want to have a piece of that pie.

So what we're seeing is a lot of interest from countries around the world, large, medium, small, that want to be part of this economic transformation. I think we're helping them have a part of this and grow their programs through this alternative way that otherwise wasn't available, given human spaceflight was sort of a government-focused program where you had some key government players, NASA, NASA, et cetera, but others couldn't easily participate. So we're helping make that more of a reality for those countries. You've mentioned a lot about the different kinds of applications that are going to be happening aboard Axiom Station. This is going to be a tremendous technological lift, for lack of a better term. And I mean, what does the IT infrastructure for something like this look like? I mean, that's got to be really something that's perhaps never been seen before. It's got to be something, a new territory, for lack of a better term.

So you're right. What we're doing on the ground as part of our company engineering teams, business operations teams to design, build the space station, and also the markets that we're developing as part of the space stations, that's one large domain or umbrella of a domain. The other one is sort of how you communicate command and control with the space station securely from the ground, right? So this is sort of the mission control center type infrastructure

that's pretty common with NASA and human spaceflight programs and also satellite constellation projects and infrastructure, right? They all have sort of a mission control function, but that's going to be very important to us. And then there's the space-based sort of domain, right? How you do communications and information assurance and capabilities in the space station to support the astronauts, to support the research you have going on,

to support your manufacturing projects. And one of the big use cases, the support, the research you have going on to support your manufacturing projects. And one of the big use cases, the orbital data centers, right, as part of the space station and how that is providing a scalable IT backbone in support of the future of mesh network in space, right? You could have hundreds or someday thousands of satellites and spacecraft connected to orbital data centers and in-orbit cloud services. So we have several domains of interest when it comes to just, you know,

IT slash cloud capabilities. You know, I will say that we have a great relationship with AWS and working together to optimize what we do on the ground, how we use the cloud to enable our engineers to be more efficient with their designs, with sharing work products, leveraging the cloud for capabilities like high performance computing or AI to support their designs, their analysis, and all those different engineering verticals, right?

It's important for us as we design this next-generation space station to be not just more advanced than what we have today, but also reliable of the highest, most quality, but also economical. Yeah, can you talk a little bit more about, you know, in that design process, the kinds of tools that you might be using? I mean, AI comes up a lot in these conversations, and I'm always curious about how that is used.

If it's used, really, actually, maybe more of the question I should be asking, and how that might be integrated. I think everyone's very curious about how that's working for a lot of people right now. Yeah, AI is interesting, right? Because it has a lot of potential,

but quite frankly, it's changing every week almost. And there's a lot of sort of iteration around the kinds of things that could be used to support. There's things that can support today, and there's things that can support in the future, right?

So when we think about the space station, once we have it up there, and how we maintain, how we do diagnostics, how we do preventive maintenance, there's a lot of elements of all that, that AI could significantly help offset. And also how we use AI and cloud service in the future to help manage the space station and operate it in the best way possible. So we talked about sort of the different applications. So command and control, ground to station, building that new for your

needs, that's got to be a really fascinating challenge to take on. What is that looking like? How are you building that out? Yeah, so the ISS has done a lot of that work for us in a way, because right now our Mission Control Center is leveraging a lot of what the ISS has done to provide mission control for the space station. So what that has allowed us to do is sort of leverage what the OS has done,

build it for our needs, but now have the ability to sort of iterate it and optimize it with cloud capabilities. So as we converge to building a mission control center for our space station, it's the best of both worlds where we're leveraging what we already know works and has done well from a, I'll say, traditional mission control perspective, but also leveraging the cloud and those kinds of capabilities where they're needed and where they actually provide an advantage.

A couple of advantages is redundancy, right? You no longer are confined to sort of physical mission control center. You can have redundancy in the cloud that enables you to have an ironclad approach to operation continuity, right? So if there's a hurricane, God forbid, heading to Houston, you don't worry

about it because you can go to your cloud instance of mission control and operate your space station that way. It's also about connectivity and ability to remotely access parts of your space station, which is beneficial as we look at expanding the user base. Because the entire user base is not going to be in Houston or any particular physical location on the ground, right?

So if we want to expand our space station to be used by companies, universities, and other kinds of research or government institutions in the US, the same in Europe, the same in Asia, other parts of the world, the cloud really opens up the ability to have multiple users accessing the same physical facility in space, but through a seamless sort of interconnected framework that's underpinning the cloud, but allows users for the space station across the world to have cloud-like capabilities supporting how you do mission control and communications from the ground of the space station. Jason's talking about an incredibly complex cloud-based functionality here, and it feels like a good opportunity to go back to Jay at AWS for more on how this works. So, Jay, help me understand how cloud-based ground infrastructure for space-based missions, like what Jason's been describing, would work. We work with the ground-based teams multiple times a week.

So they leverage services and capabilities that any other customer, not just a customer in the aerospace industry, would have access to. They have access to the same breadth and the depth of the service offerings that we have that provides them the amount of technology that they need to do all these really cool things. And they also have access to the same elasticity, the ability to scale up, scale down.

When you're doing something that's really unique, like building a space station, and this goes for a lot of our other aerospace customers, like launch providers, people building rockets, things like that. You're doing one specific thing, and it's not all that repeatable. So it's not easy to glean this enough information to train models

all that well. It's not as easy to do quality control because you're building one. You can't mess it up. We have to be careful and we have to provide the right technology for someone to do something this unique. But AWS does well there. We have so many different services

that they can leverage, machine learning, analytics, the compute capabilities that we offer. Those capabilities allow a customer like Axiom to do things that have never been done before. And hopefully, you know, we'll allow our capabilities and the things that we do for Axiom

can more easily allow them to realize their vision, which is pretty amazing. Jason had walked me through their plans for essentially a new mission control. Can you tell me a bit more about that specifically and how AWS supports that? Companies needing what we have traditionally called a mission operations center in this domain, AWS has an offering we call our CMOC, which is Cloud Managed Mission Operations Center. And typically, we work through the managed services arm of AWS, called AWS ProServe Professional Services. arm of AWS called AWS ProServe Professional Services. And we work with a customer to flesh out their specific requirements for building a missions operations center that would traditionally

be done in a physical building. You see all the old school video of these pews of computers in front of these huge screens. Organizations can do that same type of capability, leveraging virtual devices, things in the cloud. And there's benefits to using this virtual type of mission operation center where you can stand one up and have it operating at peak efficiency virtually in a region that's accessible. For example, a company like Axiom, who's going to work with all these other countries, their space industries, that have very unique data sovereignty requirements or access to their data can only be allowed from certain countries, that type of things. You can take this virtualized mission operations center and you can duplicate it and stand another identical copy up in another region that complies with some other country's data sovereignty laws. a company working with all these different countries, having that ability to easily, quickly replicate something like a mission to operation center,

which normally takes years of planning and work to put together, it's a pretty cool thing. And we're doing that for customers now. Let's go back to Jason at Axiom. I mean, I think of the iconic mission control in Houston and just knowing that that could be a mobile thing, ostensibly,

it's just really incredible to think that that's where things can be. That's quite amazing. And I imagine also as you're building out this new modern mission control to suit Axiom's needs, there are also other sort of dimensions to that that you can build out, like security

needs that might be accustomed to what you all need that maybe cloud can also enable. Yeah, and my next word out of my mouth would have been security, right? This all has to be as cyber secure as possible. We are working from an international perspective, right? So that's core to our DNA, that is something we have to manage and make sure we're doing it in as cyber secure way as possible. We're looking at not just the government guidance and standards around how to protect your space infrastructure

and your communication links. We're also looking at the future, what happens when quantum computers are powerful enough to break our existing classical encryption schemes? So we are looking into the future, right? Because we have to make sure that what we build in the ground and in space is resilient and can be evolved to manage a growing number of threats in the cyber domain. So that is very, very, very important to us and something we're spending a lot of time, efforts, and brainpower

to make sure we have good solutions and we'll have good solutions moving into the future. To you, Jay, what are some key differentiators for AWS and how they can work with innovators like Axiom and then accelerate the pace of innovation there. So in addition to the depth and breadth of services, I've talked about additional agility and scale that cloud computing, specifically AWS, offers customers.

Our specific aerospace and satellite organization is not made up of just people that specialize in cloud technologies, but also industry experts in aerospace, literal rocket scientists that I work with every day, which is pretty neat. This personnel specialization that ANS within AWS offers, that facilitates customers in our domains to accelerate their mission success.

It's not just us talking to a customer about cloud compute. We're talking to a customer about how they can use cloud compute to meet their mission success in the aerospace industry with launching satellites, launching rockets, building a space station. We've taken it a step further than just working with all customers with just a cloud technologist. We're adding in these aerospace industry experts to go a step further. And having all this additional context in these people's heads lessens the lift on our side and their side to communicate, to build solutions that work in this industry. in their side to communicate, to build solutions that work in this industry. Okay, so we have a good sense now from Jay at AWS about the heavy lift, if you will pardon the space pun, that cloud infrastructure from providers like AWS can do for space industry

leaders like Axiom, who are building some really fascinating things right now for the future space economy. Let's get back to that now and hear more about what's being worked on at Axiom with Jason again. Let's talk about actual applications in space. So one of them being an orbital data center. This to me is part where my brain just completely goes, wow. So building the orbital data centers, the IT needs for that. What does that look like? centers, the IT needs for that. What does that look like? First, I want to address the why data centers are space. And then I'll go back to the how and what the IT needs for that are, because I think the why is actually quite fascinating. I like to break it down with, so what are the shorter term whys and what are the longer term whys? In short term, we have

roughly four of them, depending on who you ask. So the first one's about making decisions from data in space as fast as possible. And space today, we use largely for position navigation and timing. We use it for Earth observation, for weather, other commercial purposes, and of course, national security.

And we use it for human space flights and government programs that touch a variety of things, including planetary science, astrophysics, a whole array of centers that are looking towards the universe and helps make the human race a smarter species, right? So there's a lot of things happening around that. As we evolve in the next few years, there's a lot more utility from space, a lot more sensors, constellations going up to support

growing demand, not just for looking back at Earth, but also expanding our presence in space, transporting a lot more data up and down and through space, looking at enhancing commercial and government space domain awareness. So there's going to be a lot more data up and down and through space, looking at enhancing commercial and government space domain awareness. So there's going to be a lot of proliferation of a lot of capabilities around that with sensors looking in every single direction.

So there's a tremendous amount of data that's going to be generated in space more and more every year for the next few decades. And the ability to capture data, you move the data, you store it, you process it, and from the processing, you gain some insights, and you take action. So there's kind of a loop, roughly speaking, of the lifecycle of data and how it's used.

Because data by itself is just data. The point is how you use it and what insights it gives you and what action you take from that. So in many cases, whether it's for security or commercial, every millisecond counts. So the ability to process data in space, especially if that data has context from a operations perspective in space, it's important to do in space because you can save

seconds to minutes in some cases. That's one of the four value props short term. The other one is bottleneck. I talked about proliferation of sensors and yes, our ability to move data up and down is getting better with

more RF-based constellations. Laser communications is definitely a huge enabler for moving a lot more data up and down. But with growth of these sort of communication pipes between space and Earth, we're also having tremendous growth, as I mentioned, of sensors, right? So we're going to a world where there's thousands of sensors. And by the way, these sensors now, hyperspectral, synthetic aperture radar, soon we'll have quantum sensors.

And these kinds of sensors are going to be generating a tremendous amount of data. So yes, our comms pipes are getting bigger, but the sensors are also generating a lot of data. So the problem of how you move that data is going to be persistent so having the ability to store process and gain insights and avoid the bottlenecks in space is also a very important value prop number three really quick it's cyber the ability to avoid the ground if you have to, or contested areas in the ground, ground stations. We saw in the Ukraine that ground stations are a vulnerability when it comes to communications

infrastructure that depends on ground stations. So being able to avoid infrastructure elements that could be compromised, the ground is actually pretty good and makes your overall space infrastructure more cyber secure. And then number four, it's about backups. The grant is not always dependable, whether it's a natural disaster, a contested area, or just lack of availability because you're over the Pacific Ocean, for example. So having the ability to use space as a backup is an important value prop. Longer term is interesting.

We have the fact that further away you go from Earth, there's a thing called speed of light that you can't beat yet. I don't know if you've heard of it, but yeah. And so, you know, as we go to cislunar and eventually Mars, you have to have data centers with you, because otherwise you just can't support um operations and sort of what humans would need us to to go up out there and thrive not just humans right whether it's exploration robots exploration missions right it's smart to have those kinds of

capabilities with you and not depend on earth for everything long long term and this is actually my favorite um but i say it's long-term because there's definitely some economics here that I don't think we're quite there yet, but we could get there yet, is about environmental sustainability. We've talked about a lot of different applications. Research will also be happening aboard Axiom Station. I imagine there's going to be a lot of different payloads

at Axiom Station that will need some kind of validation or would AWS come into play there as well? That's part of that domain as well, right? So the data center infrastructure will support satellite and spacecraft through high-speed optical links that we're connected to, but also internally facing, right, the research payloads you mentioned. Even our astronauts, rightational will have data needs and will have a variety of things they want to do as far as in-situ analytics, perhaps even AI assistance that would require some sort of data center infrastructure support that. So there is a population of servers that we will have that

will be looking at providing seamless cloud services in situ to those kinds of use cases that are focused on payloads, research, and action operations on board. And that's another thing we're exploring with our friends at AWS. So what kind of payloads are we talking about for research purposes? What kind of tech could we be expecting to see? I'm going to keep using the word foundations, but another thing the IS has done the past 20-plus years is laid the foundation for what these markets and what research areas are going to be.

It's not an all-encompassing list because there's new things that we're discovering as new use case, new markets, and we're always going to be open to new things. But the ISS has done a fantastic job, and the ISS National Labs, in seeding the fundamental science, whether it's designing new pharmaceuticals and new protein crystallization techniques and structures, whether it's figuring out new ways to make semiconductors in space.

And that's actually a very big push in the US and extended allied world, right? How do we make sure that we remain competitive and also push for advancements in next-generation semiconductors that maybe can hold more power and or have more thermal capacity or can be larger? So there's a lot of promising areas that the lack of gravity, let's put it that way, has been proven to be an industrial differentiator, where a semiconductor made on the ground has limitations in terms of how you make it because of gravity. In space, you literally delete the G or make it really, really small if you want to be

technical. And those equations change the materials or the physical forces, heat transfer, big impacts on fluids. So that derives interesting phenomenology that then derives interesting ways to make new things, right? So going back to semiconductors, you can make semiconductor wafers that are much larger or have different kinds of performance attributes that you simply cannot replicate on the ground. And there's just one example on the material side. There's applications in crystals, fiber,

a lot of discussion around Z-blank fiber and a lot of research and fundamental science that's been done on that. On the pharma side, we've had some very interesting research around cancer treatments as part of our last missions. That's another area we're looking at,

how you can leverage the light gravity to innovate how you can defeat some pretty serious diseases. And how transformational would that be if, let's say, five years from now, you can make batches and batches of some sort of serious disease treatments as part of an in-space manufacturing facility that you otherwise cannot have on the ground. So those are the kind of things that we're very, very excited about

because those not just drive new markets and for the sake of new markets, but drives broader transformation for benefit of all humans all over the world. So those are the kinds of things we're really excited about. And that's it for AWS in Orbit, Episode 10, Building Opportunity with Axiom. Our special thanks to Jason Aspiotis from Axiom and Jay Naves from AWS for joining us. For additional resources from this episode and for more episodes in the AWS In Orbit series, definitely check out our show notes over at space.n2k.com slash AWS. This episode was produced by Alice Carruth

and powered by AWS. Our AWS producer is Laura Barber, mixing by Elliot Peltzman and Trey Hester with original music and sound design by Elliot Peltzman. Our executive producer is Brandon Karpf and I am your host, Maria Varmasis. Thank you for listening. you