AMAZON WEB SERVICES IS BEST known for its data centers on Earth, but in recent years, the cloud-computing company has started investing off-world. In fact, the Seattle-based subsidiary of Amazon.com, the giant e-commerce website, has the largest market share of cloud-computing services on terra firma, ahead of rivals such as Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. It sees space as the next frontier for computing. "We're sitting in this really interesting inflection point, where technology, including the cloud, I would offer, has really opened the aperture of what we can do in space in the future," says Clint Crosier, director of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) aerospace and satellite business. The company envisions that by re-applying some of its cloud-computing applications, including artificial intelligence programs, to edge-computing processors in space, it can liberate satellites, spacecraft and space stations from bandwidth limitations and latency problems that come with radioing data back to Earth.
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