[juliansimioni]

As an individual who certainly doesn't have any satellites in orbit and really doesn't have any space-specific skills beyond KSP, but who has enough money to blow on $10/minute fees, is there anything I could do with this?

Not illegal or nefarious things either, but could I do something like listen in on data being transmitted down by an existing satellite (say something like Hubble or Landsat that will eventually result in public data anyway)?

[kochie]

Absolutely, so it’s possible to connect to weather satellites like NOAA-20 and Aqua and pull down the data from them as they pass. Check out the CloudFormation templates to get started. 1. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ground-station/latest/ug/custome... 2. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ground-station/latest/ug/choose-...

[solarkraft]

A limited version is actually possible with relatively cheap components: https://youtu.be/cjClTnZ4Xh4

[bellatrix21]

This AWS blog post does something like that: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/publicsector/earth-observation-...

[rosndo]

> Not illegal or nefarious things either

Well, now I’d love to know about exciting illegal things one could theoretically do with this.

Maybe pop a root shell on a satellite and have the coolest bouncer on efnet?

Maybe you could spy on satphones? But I guess AWS would be prohibitively expensive for that.