The world's largest public cloud provider, Amazon Web Services, is looking to expand its reach.
Job listings originally spotted by This Just In describe "a big, audacious space project" that "will have a historic impact.”
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"Are you passionate about building, owning and operating satellite and space systems and ready to make another game-changing technology? If the answer is yes, then Amazon Web Services (AWS) has an exciting opportunity for you," a job listing for a Space and Satellite Product Manager states.
"We need a Product Manager to help us develop services and features that enable our customers to integrate their space systems with Amazon’s massive-scale data center networks.
"These products will provide high bandwidth and low latency solutions for networking launch vehicles, aggregating satellite systems, inter-connecting space system networks, and enabling management and monitoring of all satellite control network devices and critical data center infrastructure."
Another job listing adds: "We are seeking a Software Development Engineer to build and maintain highly available, massively scalable, real time satellite data processing systems! This team will have the opportunity to work on highly visible projects that directly impact both Amazon teams and Amazon customers around the world as we build space processing services and features used by thousands of commercial and government customers each week."
Amazon has not officially commented on any space plans, and quietly removed the original job postings from its own website.
NASA is a long-standing AWS customer, and the cloud company has provided services for the Hubble Telescope team and the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research. It is also courting the Chilean government to host the vast majority of astronomical data from its terrestrial telescopes.
In June, AWS held its Public Sector Summit in Washington, D.C. with a pre-day dedicated to space, with a keynote from the SVP of Blue Origin, Rob Meyerson.
Owned by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Blue Origin is an aerospace equipment manufacturer and spaceflight services company that hopes to compete with SpaceX for private rocket launches. Among its clients is OneWeb, a 648 satellite-strong low Earth orbit network backed by SoftBank that plans to provide broadband access to "hundreds of millions of potential users" in areas lacking reliable connectivity.
So far, Blue Origin has made no public moves to build a space network of its own, whereas SpaceX has announced plans for a 12,000 satellite system called Starlink. Were it to offer such a service, it could potentially turn to Amazon for help - after all, its business runs on AWS.
On the AWS Public Sector Podcast, the Amazon Web Service's Health and Science division head, Jamie Baker, said: "In order for us to be able to innovate and accelerate our path to colonizing off of our planet, the cloud is perfect to be able to do many, many designs and iterations to solve some of those big challenges that we face about how to reuse rockets and different types of propulsion that can get sufficient amount of resources into space so we could eventually become an interplanetary species."
