Amazon Web Services is looking at space opportunities in asteroid mining, tourism, manufacturing and digital services over the next five to 10 years.
This comes as an increasingly lucrative and competitive market unfolds beyond the 100-kilometre high Karman line – a definition of the boundary between the Earth’s atmosphere and outer space.
With new sectors emerging in the space industry, the world’s biggest cloud services provider is seeking to reduce the cost of capturing, analytics, storing and sharing valuable space data in a fraction of the time for clients from major governments to smaller start-ups, The National reported.
“We want to democratise space data. We want to provide space data to more people in more places around the world, so that innovative people can come up with all sorts of new ways to support climate, or economic development or smart cities or environmental monitoring,” Clint Crosier, director of the Aerospace and Satellite Solutions unit at AWS, told The National on the sidelines of the International Astronautical Congress in Dubai.
“We need to make the data available in places it’s not available today and that’s one of our real goals. At AWS, one of our mantras is ‘making the world a better place from space’.”
The global space industry could generate revenue of more than $1 trillion in 2040, up from $350 billion currently, amid high levels of private funding, advances in technology and growing public sector interest in renewing the call to space exploration, according to a report by Morgan Stanley.
Potential opportunities are in areas such as satellite broadband, high-speed product delivery and human space travel, it said. AWS’s aerospace unit is considering applications for its cloud computing services in the next decade and beyond in emerging sectors.
“There is a broader group of missions that are emerging in space that we are not doing today that we will, and I would put space tourism in that category, but on-orbit manufacturing is one of the things that are really the most interesting,” said Mr Crosier, a former US Air Force major general who most recently directed the establishment of the US Space Force.
Building and assembling satellites on the ground before launching them into space is very expensive, leading companies to explore platforms similar to the International Space Station that can be used for additive manufacturing and building parts in space, he said. This cuts costs and opens possibilities such as the ability to create purer fibre optics in a zero-gravity environment.