[MUSIC] [MUSIC] >> Welcome to AWS in Orbit. I'm Maria Varmazas. 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 de-orbit 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, 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 Espiotes, 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 Espiotes. In my role, I have the pleasure and honor really to work on some really interesting projects revolving around the space station rebuilding. So, Axiom is 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 by 2014, can we have a sitting space with, 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 Silly would be a centrifugal infrastructure that allows for similar gravity for the people to be able to live comfortably, with large parts of station being my gravity enabled to leverage my gravity for in-space manufacturing and in-space research. The rest of the space station addressing variety of use cases and new markets like orbital data centers, like in-space manufacturing and construction rights are using large-scale platforms and robotics and new techniques around manufacturing, whether 3D printing, other forms of added manufacturing in-space welding, for example, to build next-generation infrastructure space, to help assemble next-generation spacecraft that will someday take humans from Earth orbit to Mars. The vision of a sitting space is not just about the people, it's about the work they do around data infrastructure, research, manufacturing, new materials of space to bring back the ground to infuse and terrestrial economies, but also constructing new things in space that we will use to further our exploration scientific aspirations and species between here, Mars and beyond. So it becomes an economic nexus that helps drive, not just calm of us, but also more exploration, more human endeavors beyond Earth's vicinity. Yeah, and the timing is fantastic also, 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 my gravity and the benefits of my gravity for developments of new pharmaceuticals and materials, but also the benefits of having a space station, 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 "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 builds, government owns, 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 would be possible. So there's other things that play as well as far as timing. What's happening in the world of space communications and mesh networking or alternate, as some people call it, that's also sort of a foundational block, upon which now you can intersect what's happening in that part of the space ecosystem, independent of space stations, then how space stations are also arriving in parallel. And then if you intersect it too, 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 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. 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 compute, 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. We launched a Snowcone to the space station with the initial intent of running a demonstration that proved to Axiom that own 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 AX1 mission, which is the first all-private astronaut mission to the space station. So we took all these images that astronauts provided, and we did object recognition. We inference 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 of it 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, or what do we know what that vision would be? We are using the ISS for these precursor missions. And part of what we're doing that is to learn as a company to do routine commercial human space flight. 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 space flight. That some of it is going to be government, of course. NASA's going to be a perpetual driver of human space flight. So our key partners like ESA, Jackson, et cetera. 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 in all these countries are investing in satellite capabilities, other kinds of things with space, but they also have an interest in growing their human space flight programs because they see the synergies between the two, right? There's a lot of things that connect all the transportation, the infrastructure, the competencies, or 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 so a part of the same economy, right? A space-based economy. So as a space-based economy grows to 1 trillion, 1.5, 2 trillion the next few decades, more and more countries obviously want to have a piece that pie. So what we're seeing is a lot of interest from countries around the world's large, medium, small that want to be part of this economic transformation. We're like to think we're helping them have a part of this and grow their programs through this alternative way that otherwise wasn't a valuable given human space flight was sort of a government's focus program where you had some key government players, mass ice and etc. 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 is 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 stations securely from the ground. Right. So this is sort of the mission control sensor type infrastructure. That's pretty common with NASA and human space flight programs and also satellite constellation projects and infrastructure. They all have sort of a mission control function. That's going to be very important to us. And then there's the space space sort of domain, how you do communications and information assurance and capabilities in a space station to support irrationals, the support, the research you have going on to support you manufacturing projects. And in one of the big use cases, renewable 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, where you could have hundreds or someday thousands of satellite to 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've done the ground, how we use the cloud to enable our engineers to be more efficient with their designs, with sharing work products, you know, 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. 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. Like, 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 man is a space station, operate it 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? Yes, so the ISS has done as a low that work for us in a way, because right now our mission control centers leveraging the law 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 ISS 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 know, long are confined to sort of physical mission control center. You can have redundancy in the cloud that enables you to have an iron cloud approach to operational 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 a part of your space station, which is beneficial as we look at expanding the user base, right? Because the entire user base is not going to be in Houston at any particular physical location in 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 Europe, the same in Asia, other parts of the world, the cloud really opens up the ability to have multiple users access in the same physical facility in space, but through a seamless sort of interconnected framework that's underpinned with the cloud, but allows multiple people, multiple users around the world to access part of our space station, right? So it does become really important as we look to expand the user base and the 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 their space 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 then 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, it's not all that repeatable, so it's not easy to clean 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 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 operation center in this domain, AWS has an offering we call our CMOC, which is cloud managed mission operation center, and typically we work through the managed 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 operation 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, you know, allowed from certain countries, that type of things. You can take this virtualized mission operation center and you can duplicate it and stand another identical copy up in another region that complies with some other countries, data sovereignty laws. And so a company working with all these different countries, having that ability to easily quickly replicate something like a missions 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 is just it's just really incredible to think that that's where things can be. That's quite amazing. And I imagine also, as you know, 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 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 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 a cyber secure way as possible. We're looking at not just you know, the government guidance and standards around how to protect your space infrastructure and your communication links was looking in the future. You know, 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 resilience 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 brain power to make sure we have good solutions and we'll have good solutions moving into the future. TUJ, 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 like industry experts in aerospace, literal rocket scientists that I work with every day, which is pretty neat. This personnel specialization that A and S 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 like 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. Okay, so we have a good sense now from J 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? First, I want to address the why data centers of 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 more the shorter term wise and one of the longer term wise and short term we have roughly four of them depending on who you are. So the first one's about making decisions from data in space as far 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 sensors that are looking towards the universe and helps make the human race a smarter species. So there's a lot of things happening around that. As we evolve 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 of 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 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 life cycle of data and how it's used because data by itself is just data. The point is how to use it and what insights give you and what actions 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 perspective in space, it's important to do in space because you can save seconds to minutes in some cases. So that's one of the four value props. 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 work with this 1000 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, right? So yes, our comms, plaques are getting bigger, but the sensors are also generating a lot of data, right? So the problem of how you move that data is going to be persistent. So having the ability to store a process and gain insights and avoid the ball next 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 ground is not always dependable, whether it's a natural disaster, a contested area, or this lack of availability, because you're over the Pacific Ocean, for example, right? So having the ability to use space to 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 be. Yeah. I don't know if you heard of it, but yeah. And so, as we go to Sislunar and eventually Mars, you have to have data centers with you, because otherwise it just can't support operations and sort of what humans would need us to go out there and thrive. Not just humans, right? Whether it's makes generation robots, exploration missions, right? It's smarter to have those kinds of capabilities with you and not depend on Earth for everything. Long, long term, and this is actually my favorite, but I say it's long, long term because there's definitely some economics here that I don't think we're quite there yet, but we could get there, 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 control your facing, right? The research payloads you mentioned, even our rationales, right? We'll have data needs and we'll 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 of that. So, there is a population of servers that we will have that will be looking at providing seamless cloud services and situ to those kinds of use cases that are focused on payloads, research, and national 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 the other thing the ISIS has done the past 20 plus years has laid the foundation for what these markets and more 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, right? And we're always going to be open to new things, but the ISIS done a fantastic job in the ISIS national labs in sort of 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 extending allied world, right? How do we make sure that we remain competitive and also push for advancements in next generation semiconductors that may be more 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 that way, has been proven to be an industrial differentiator, right? 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 very small if you want to be technical. And then those equations change the materials or the physical forces, he 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-blamp fiber and a lot of research and fundamental science have done on that. On the pharma side, we've had some very interesting research around cancer treatments. As part of our last mission, that's another area we're looking at, how you can leverage the lack of 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 manufacture facility that you otherwise cannot have on the ground. So, those are 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 kind 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 Espiotes 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/AWS. This episode was produced by Alice Karuth and powered by AWS. Our AWS producer is Lara Barber, mixing by Elliot Peltzmann and Trey Hester, with original music and sound design by Elliot Peltzmann. Our executive producer is Brandon Karth, and I am your host, Maria Varmazis. Thank you for listening. [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]
