With the evolution of technology and the demand for satellite data, the demand to reach space has greatly increased. SpaceFlight Industries addresses this new need by providing cost-effective products and services, rideshare launches, and global communications networks. In addition to these, SpaceFlight provides geospatial intelligence services through BlackSky Spectra, emabling organizations to gather, analyze, and visualize data. Come listen to SpaceFlight Industries discuss how it used AWS to build satellites, construct ground stations, and more, to deliver value to customers.

1. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Scott Herman, VP of Product Development, BlackSky
Robert Cahn, Director of Software Engineering, BlackSky
BlackSky: Advancing the Geospatial
Revolution with Cloud-First Approach

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BlackSky Delivers Global Intelligence
A Global platform that delivers timely local insights
Tasking &
Collection
Monitoring &
Detection
Geospatial
Intelligence
Global Collection
Network
Global Activity
& Site Monitoring
Hyperlocal Insights
& Predictive Analytics
BlackSky
Constellation
Continuous
Insights
Into Global
Change
• 25 EO and Radar SATs
• >40K Global News Sources
• 100M Mobile Devices
• 70K Ships and Aircraft
• 8+ Social Media Networks
• 5K Environmental Sensors
• 24 - 60 1m EO Satellites
• 5x – 12x per day revisit
• Unique Daily Access Times
• On-Demand Tasking
• Global Ground Network
• Thematic Event Detection
• 100K Sites/Facilities
• Multi-Source Correlation
• Change Detection
• Event Data API’s
• Change Detection
• Anomaly Detection
• Anticipatory Collection
• Context
Observe
Detect
Understand
Enhance

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BlackSky Global Monitoring Services
Tasking & Collection Services Global Monitoring Services Geospatial Intelligence
Location Based Intelligence that provides early warning and insights on risks,
threats, and opportunities that can impact to your business
On Demand access to a global
collection network of imaging, RF,
and terrestrial sensors
Situational Awareness – Indications & Warnings - Actionable Intelligence
Early warning on risks, threats,
and opportunities that can
impact your business
Insights and assessments for
informed decision making

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BlackSky Global Monitoring
Architected for AWS
Public AWS and GovCloud and C2S
Global Reach – deployed in
multiple regions worldwide
Wide range of AWS services
Premier AWS Partner with AWS Big
Data Certification

8. BlackSky Global
Monitoring Analytics

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BlackSky Monitoring Services
Delivering Timely and Relevant Insights about our Changing World
Monitor
Sites and Areas
of Interests
Detect Changes
& Anomalous
Events
Anticipatory
Tasking & Collection
Critical
Infrastructure
Industrial
Facilities
Natural
Resources
BlackSky Constellation
3rd Party Satellites
News & Social
Media
Transportation
Networks
Borders
3rd Party Sensor
Networks, IoT, &
Mobile
Continuously Monitor the World to Provide Insights on Events that Matter
Continuous
Insights Into
Global Change
• Supply Chain Events
• Conflict Events
• Humanitarian Events
• Security Events
• Etc.
Emerging
Crisis Areas
Report &
Alert
Enrich, Filter
& Extract
Geospatial Content
& Context
Analytics
Alerts
Global Database of High Value Sites

11. Monitoring Global Events
Thematic Channels – Conflict, Energy, Outbreak, Humanitarian, Military, Construction, Crime

14. Port and Commodity Monitoring – Western Australia Iron Ore
IoT Device Tracking from Mine to Ship to Port provides unique insights
Daily inflows &
outflows of Iron Ore
from Port Walcott
Satellite Imagery provides
volumetrics correlated to rail cars

16. BlackSky

17. Massive Federated Catalog for Commercial Imagery
Knowledge base of commercial imagery since mid-1990s to today (40M+ images) from 25+ remote sensing satellites

19. BlackSky Constellation

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BlackSky Constellation - Enabling The Ability to Observe and Understand
the World in Real Time
BlackSky – Multiple orbit planes arranged to maximize revisit

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 North Korea
Pathfinder Imagery

22. Spaceflight Ground
Stations

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BlackSky Commercial Concept of Operations

24. Spaceflight Industries proprietary information 24
Ground Station Network
2017 2019
United States
Germany
Japan
New Zealand
Guam
Chile
Alaska
10 Spaceflight Ground Stations planned to deploy by 2019.
South Africa
Dubai
Australia
FAI: Fairbanks, AK, USA
IVC: Invercargill, NZ

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Satellite Operations Architecture – High Level View
 Business Systems: Customer management tools and
business functions such as finance and customer reporting
capabilities
 Platform Operations: Customer interface for placing
tasking/archive orders and viewing fulfilled products
 Ground & Control Software: Responsible for interfacing with
ground stations and constellation satellites to fulfill orders
from the Platform
 Imaging Operations: Responsible for image data archive and
processing prior to delivery to the Platform
 Ground Station Hardware: Physical ground station hardware
for existing and future test and production ground stations
 Global – Hardware: Physical satellite hardware for a Global
spacecraft
 Global – Flight Software: Software running on the Global
spacecraft

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• Designed for AWS
• Space Operations Services on AWS
• AWS For Multiple Environments
• AWS For Satellite & Groundstation simulation
• Automated provisioning of environments
• VPC Networks
• Hosted Services
• Consequences of Designing for AWS
• Future goals
BlackSky Satellite
Operations
Overview

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• Designed and built for AWS from beginning for lights out operations
• Designed with security in mind
• Python on Linux running in Docker Containers distributed on managed clusters of EC2 instances
• GovCloud provides ITAR and EAR compliance
• Direct connect allows use of MOC to securely command satellite constellations
• Designed use of virtual and physical mock satellites for scalability testing of constellation management while also supporting
development of flight software that runs on the actual satellites.
BlackSky Satellite Operations –Designed for AWS
• Mission Planning
• Constellation Management
• Mission Script Builder
• Satellite Model
• Tasking Interface
• Ephemeris Service
• Image Collection Feasibility Service
• Telemetry and Monitoring
• Telemetry Packet Routing
• Pass Data Processor
• Radio Chain control and software radios
• Radio Emulators
• Image Processing
• Image Archiving
• TLE Updater
• Weather Service
Space Operations on AWS
Constellation Management Designed for AWS GovCloud from scratch

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 AWS For Multiple Environments
• SFI Able to define and start new environments on demand
• Dev - Environments for testing development of ground &
control systems
• Stage - Staging area for testing updates to the system
• Ops-Test – Space Operations environment to test operator
interfaces
• Custom Projects - Technology reused by Launch Services with
custom environments deployed on demand.
BlackSky Satellite Operations – AWS For Multiple Environments And
Simulations
 AWS For Satellite & Ground-station simulation
• Designed system for multiple satellites and ground-stations from
beginning - Required use of PowerPC emulation environment
running on AWS Linux Instances running X64
• Allows test and verification of our proprietary mission planning
system at scale
• System works with arbitrary combinations of real and virtual
hardware
• Required custom emulation code of complex devices and support
in flight software

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 Use of tools for automated provisioning
• SFI uses tools for automated provisioning of our systems using configuration files
• This allows us to easily deploy environments that are highly similar but which has operational differences.
• Automated processes
• Scripted provisioning of AWS resources with controlled configurations
• Cluster management and automatic redeployments
• Secrets control
• Configurations and DNS to groundstations
 Transit VPC Networks
• SFI uses Transit VPCs For Network Security and Visibility. This allows us to have visibility beyond VPN boundaries and to set up very complex firewall
rules on software firewalls.
 Hosted Services used by Space Operations
• RDS
• PostgreSQL database for the SFI Satellite Model value storage. Able to launch this service with virtually no setup effort on our part
• Elasticsearch
• Elasticsearch is used for viewing of all syslog information received from the satellite constellation, physical and virtual groundstations, and all
constellation management services.
• Elasticsearch is heavyweight and expensive but can be shared across our separate environments.
• Again, very easy to use because no real setup required.
• SQS
• SFI uses the simple queuing service to notify other services of events such as notifying the image processing system of a successful downlink
of an image.
BlackSky Satellite Operations – Automated provisioning of environments,
VPC Networks, and Hosted Services

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•Since SFI has physical groundstations, we limit ourselves to technology
stacks that work both in AWS and on the VM servers that drive
groundstation orchestration. This allows us to develop for one platform,
not two. However, this limits some of the AWS services we are able to use.
•Emulation technologies like minio (S3) help mitigate somewhat.
•We have experienced network bandwidth and latency issues between
GovCloud, and corporate assets.
•AWS often fails to provide meaningful information during system outages.
•AWS gates features that could impact ITAR compliance which may delay
using newer AWS technologies. Often means that GovCloud is
technologically behind the other availability zones.
•TL:DR: GovCloud is not the same as fully featured AWS
Consequences of Designing for AWS
•Use AWS Support for Docker Containers
•Satellite ground & control systems are highly distributed and each service
runs in its own docker container on Nomad cluster
•Will look at using container service in the future
•AWS native replacements for third party provisioning tools.
•Lambda for our lower volume systems.
Future goals
Consequences of
Designing Satellite
Operations for
AWS & Future
Goals

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Processing High Resolution Satellite Imagery
Normalization for Sensor to Sensor
Variations
Color Corrections & Contrast
Enhancements
Geolocation Refinement &
Topological Corrections
60 Satellites Produce Quite a
Lot of Imagery!
A World of Imaging Conditions Makes Auto
Processing Complex
Every Image Needs to Be Processed;
Processing Is Computationally Intensive
Image Processing Chain
Image Data
Image Products

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Cloud computing is one of
the enabling technologies
fueling the “new-space
revolution”
•Cloud computing
•Low cost space launch
•COTS electronics
AWS enables BlackSky
to provide customers
with a unique
geospatial intelligence
solution
Large volumes of data
(satellite imagery and
open source data) can
be rapidly stored,
accessed, processed and
disseminated
Satellite and ground
station operations can
be rapidly scaled and
virtualized for end-to-
end testing and
checkout prior to launch
Conclusions

33. © 2018, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
Thank you!