“Earth is Just Our Starting Place:” An Earth & Space on AWS Event Recap

AWS hosted its first-ever Earth and Space on AWS event in Washington, DC, leading up to the AWS Public Sector Summit. Speakers from Blue Origin, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), DigitalGlobe, and others spoke about the endless possibilities for the future in our solar system and beyond.

Teresa Carlson, VP of Worldwide Public Sector, kicked off the half-day event and took the audience through our customer journey across Earth and space. When data is shared on AWS, anyone can analyze it and build services using a broad range of compute and data analytics products, including Amazon EC2, Amazon Athena, AWS Lambda, and Amazon EMR. Sharing data in the cloud lets data users spend more time on data analysis and less on data acquisition.

Launch. Land. Repeat.

Rob Meyerson, SVP of Blue Origin, delivered a goosebump-inducing keynote focused on how technology is accelerating research and testing and bringing space within reach. “Starting colonies on the moon is the first step to exploring Mars,” said Rob. With the mission to have millions of people living and working in space, Blue Origin practices “Gradatim Ferociter” or “Step by Step, Ferociously.” Relying on technology like machine learning and data science, they plan to start selling tickets to space in 2019 confirming the theme of the day: Earth is just our starting point.

Breakout sessions featured AWS experts and customers across the Earth and Space community, including NASA JPL, NGA, Lockheed Martin, Element 84, and Development Seed.

To keep the conversation going, Tom Soderstrom, IT Chief Technology and Innovation Officer, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory will be hosting a special mainstage spotlight session at the AWS Public Sector Summit on Wednesday, June 20th at 4:00-5:00 pm.

AWS is committed to our customers across these industries and we look forward to hosting them and sharing their stories at other events in the future. Stay tuned for recorded content from this event.

Learn more about innovation from our AWS Public Sector Summit sponsor Smartronix.