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Category: satellites

There are huge multi-trillion dollar opportunities developing with Space and the further evolution of the internet.

Space launch and space satellites were already a $300 billion per year industry. Cloud Computing is a $200 billion market in 2018. Global Internet services is a $600 billion market. The Global IT market is nearing $5 trillion in size. The global Auto industry is $2 trillion in size. The Global supply chain industry is $40 trillion in size.

Space launch, Internet and communication, Internet of Things, Space mining, Space Colonization will each become future multi-trillion markets. Those that are already trillion dollar markets will become even larger.

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Ground control to major Jeff (Bezos).

Amazon Web Services (AWS), the company’s cloud computing arm, just announced a new offering aimed at satellite operators.

The news: At its annual re: Invent conference in Seattle this week, the web giant unveiled a service that lets owners of satellites rent time on Amazon-managed ground stations to send and receive data from orbit. The service, called AWS Ground Station, works in much the same way as Amazon’s well-established business for tapping computing capacity via the cloud.

Ground control … According to an AWS blog post, big businesses with a large number of satellites typically build and operate their own ground stations at a cost of a million dollars or more for each one. Smaller companies that can’t afford their own often end up signing inflexible, long-term contracts with third parties that own and run such stations.

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Really?

Ethiopia has announced its intention to launch its first satellite during 2019. According to the Ethiopian Space Science and Technology Institute (ESSTI) at the Addis Ababa University, the satellite is expected to be launched from China during September 2019.

The initial plans to launch the satellite were announced in 2016 at the same time the Ethiopian Council of Ministers approved the establishment of ESSTI.

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Location data beamed from GPS satellites are used by smartphones, car navigation systems, the microchip in your dog’s neck and guided missiles — and all those satellites are controlled by the U.S. Air Force. That makes the Chinese government uncomfortable, so it’s developing an alternative that a U.S. security analyst calls one of the largest space programs the country has undertaken.

The Beidou Navigation System will be accessible worldwide by 2020.

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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — A pair of tiny experimental satellites trailing NASA’s InSight spacecraft all the way to Mars face their biggest test yet. Their mission: Broadcast immediate news, good or bad, of InSight’s plunge through the Martian atmosphere on Monday. Named WALL-E and EVE after the main characters in the 2008 animated movie, the twin CubeSats will pass within a few thousand miles (kilometers) of Mars as the lander attempts its dicey touchdown. If these pipsqueaks manage to relay InSight’s radio signals to ground controllers nearly 100 million miles (160 million kilometers) away, we’ll know within minutes whether the spacecraft landed safely.

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Every action creates an equal and opposite reaction. It’s perhaps the best known law of physics, and Guido Fetta thinks he’s found a way around it.

According to classical physics, in order for something—like a spaceship—to move, conservation of momentum requires that it has to exert a force on something else. A person in roller skates, for example, pushes off against a wall; a rocket accelerates upward by propelling high-velocity combusted fuel downward. In practice, this means that space vessels like satellites and space stations have to carry up to half their weight in propellant just to stay in orbit. That bulks up their cost and reduces their useful lifetime.

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Imagine an airport where thousands of planes, empty of fuel, are left abandoned on the tarmac. That is what has been happening for decades with satellites that circle the Earth.

When satellites run out of fuel, they can no longer maintain their precise orbit, rendering them useless even if their hardware is still intact.

“It’s literally throwing away hundreds of millions of dollars,” Al Tadros, vice president of space infrastructure and civil Space at a called SSL, said this month at a meeting in the US capital of key players in the emerging field of on-orbit servicing, or repairing satellites while they are in space.

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