 Well everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AWS Public Sector Summit in person here in Washington DC. I'm John Furrier, your host. Great to be back face to face. We've got a great special guest, Clint Crozier, who's the director of AWS Aerospace and Satellite, major general of the Air Force Space Force retired. Great to see you in person again. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Thank you for having me. I appreciate that. First of all, props to you for doing a great job at Amazon, bringing all your knowledge from Space Force and Air Force into the cloud. Thank you. So that's great historical context. It's been valuable, and it's provided a whole lot of insight into what we're building with the AWS Space Team for sure. So the number one question I get a lot is, we want more space content. What's the coolest thing going on in space? Is there really a satellite behind the moon that's hidden there somewhere? What's the coolest thing going on in space? Well, the coolest thing that's going on in space, I think, is you're seeing the rapid growth of the space industry. I mean, to me, I've been in the space industry for 34 years now. And there have been periods where we projected lots of growth and activity, and it just didn't really come about, especially in the 80s and the 90s. But what we're seeing today is that growth is taking place. Whether it's the numbers of satellites that are being launched around the globe every year, there's some 3,000 objects on orbit today. Estimates are that there'll be 30,000 objects at the end of the decade, or the number of new companies, or the number of global spending. It is just happening right now, and it's really exciting. So when people say they see your space, there's a lot of economic changes in terms of the cost structures of how to get things deployed into space. That brings up the question of, okay, is space an opportunity? Is it a threat vector? What about congestion and security? Yeah, well, three great things. Absolutely an opportunity. We're seeing the rapid growth of the space industry, and we're seeing more commercialization than ever before. In my whole career, the Air Force, or NASA, or the NRO, would sort of hold things and do them themselves. Today, you're seeing commercial contracts going out from the National Reconnaissance Office, NASA, from the Air Force, from the Space Force. So lots of opportunity for commercial companies. Security, absolutely priority number one, should be. Security is baked into everything we do at AWS, and our customers, our government-classified customers, tell us the reason they came to AWS is our security is top-notch and certified for all their workloads. And as you well know, we have from unclassified all the way up to top-secret capabilities on the AWS cloud. So just powerful opportunities for our customers. Yeah, a lot of competitors will throw foot on that. I know I've reported on some of that. And not a lot of people have that same credential. Sure. Compared to the competition. Sure. So I have to ask you, now that you have the top secret, all these clouds that are very tailorable, flexible with space, how are you helping customers with this aerospace division? Is it commercial in the public sector together? What's the- All of the above. Take us through the value proposition of AWS. Happy to do this. So what we recognized over the last two years or so, we at AWS recognized all this rapid growth that we're talking about within the space industry, every sector, from launch to on-orbit activities to space exploration, all of it. And so AWS saw that, and we looked at ourselves and said, do we have the right organization and expertise in place, really to help our customers lean into that? And the answer was, we decided to build a team that had deep experience in space. And that was the team that we grew because our thesis was, if you have a deep experience in space, a deep experience in cloud, you bring those two together and it's a powerful contribution. And so we've assembled a team with more than 500 years of collective hands-on experience, flying satellites, launching rockets. And when we sit down with our customers to innovate on their behalf, we're able to come up with some incredible solutions. And happy to talk about those. I'd love to talk about, first of all, there's a lot of space nerds out there. I love space. I love space geeking out on the technology. But take us through the year you had. You've had a pretty incredible year with some results. You have that range for us there. I know you're hiring. I know a lot of people want to work for you, so the resumes are flying in. A lot of action. What are the highlights from this year? So the highlights, I think, is we've built a team that the industry is telling us was needed. Again, there was no organization that really served the space cloud industry. And so we're kind of building this industry within the industry, the space cloud industry. And so, number one, just establishing that team and leaning into that industry has been valuable. The other thing that we're real proud of is we built a global team. Because space is a global enterprise. We have teams in Europe and in Asia and South America here in the US. So we built a global team. One of the things that we did right up front, we weren't even six months old when we envisioned the idea of doing the AWS Space Accelerator. And some of the folks told me, Clint, you know, six months under your belt, maybe you ought to get your feet under you. And I said, no, no, we move fast to support our customers. And so we made a call for any space startup that wanted to come on board with AWS and go through a four week space accelerator. We partnered with Sarah from Capital. And the idea was if you're a small company that wants to grow and build and learn how you can use the cloud to gain competitive advantage, come with us. And so John, I would have been happy if we had 50 companies applied. We had 194 companies across 44 countries that applied to our accelerator. We had to down select to 10, but that was a tremendous accomplishment. Two of those are speaking this afternoon where they met each other at our accelerator and now have formed a partnership, URSA Space and Hawkeye 360 on how they build on the cloud together. Fascinating. Well, it's great. I love that story. First of all, I love the military mindset. No, we're not gonna wait. We're gonna take that map. Move it out. You know, it's not take that hill. It's take that planet. Our customers won't wait. Innovation doesn't wait. The future doesn't wait. We have to move out. So this brings up the entrepreneurship angle. You got there a little early, but I want to talk about it because it's super important. Sure. There's an entrepreneurial culture happening right now in the space community. There is. At large. And it's getting bigger and wider. Bigger every day. What is that? Someone says, hey, what's going on with entrepreneurship in the space? What are the key dynamic? What's the power dynamic? It's not money. There's money out there. But what's the structural thing happening? The key dynamic, I think, is we're seeing that we can unlock things that we could never do before. And one of our goals is, the more space data we can make more accessible to more people around the world, it unlocks things we couldn't do. We're working with space companies who are using space data to track endangered whales off the coast of California. We're working with companies that are using space data to measure thermal and greenhouse emissions for climate change and climate management. We're working with one company, Edgy Bees, who has a small satellite constellation, and they're using it to build satellite-based augmented reality to provide it to first responders as they go into a disaster response area, and they get a 3D view of what they're going into. None of those workloads were possible five years ago, and the cloud and cloud-based technologies are really what opens those kind of workloads up. What kind of higher level services do you see emerging from space cloud? Because obviously you have to have some infrastructure. Absolutely. You got to put some stuff into space. Yep, absolutely. Why chain, reliability, also threat. I mean, I can have a satellite attack on another satellite, or I'm just making that up, but I'm sure there's other scenarios that the generals are thinking about. So, space security and cyberspace security is critical, and as I said, it's built into everything we do in all of our platforms, so you're absolutely right about that. But when we think about the entrepreneurship, you know, what we're seeing is, and I'll give you a good example of why the industry is growing so fast and why cloud. So one company we work with, Leo Labs. So Leo identified the growth in the Leo, low earth orbit segment, 3,000 objects on orbit today, 30,000 tomorrow. Who's going to do the space traffic management for 30,000 objects in space that are all in the same orbital regime? And so Leo Labs built a process to do space traffic management collision avoidance. They were running it on premises. It took them eight hours to do a single run for a single satellite conjunction. We got them to help understand how to use the cloud. They moved all that to AWS. Now that same run they do in 10 seconds, eight hours to 10 seconds. Those are the kind of workloads that space proliferates and we grow that we just can't execute without cloud and cloud-based technology. It's interesting, you know, the cloud has that same kind of line. Move your workloads to the cloud and then refactor. So space workloads are coming to the cloud. They are. It's changing the culture. So I have to ask you, I know there's a lot of young people out there looking for careers and interests. I mean, Cal Poly's going into the high school now and offering classes to high school. There's so much interest in space and technology. What is the cultural mindset to be successful? Andy Jassy last year, we talked about the mindset of the builder and the enterprise CXO. Get off your butt and start building. There's a space ethos going on. What is the mindset? What would you share your views on this? The mindset is innovation and moving fast, right? We lived most of my career in the time where we had an unlimited amount of money and unlimited amount of time. And so we were really slow and deliberate about how we built things. The future won't wait. Whether it's commercial application or military application, we have to move fast. And so the culture is the faster we can move, the more we'll succeed. And there's no way to move faster than when you're building on the AWS cloud. Ground station is a good example. You know, the proposition of the cloud is don't invest your limited resources in your own infrastructure that doesn't differentiate your capability. And so we did that same thing with ground station and we've said to companies, don't spend millions of dollars on developing your own ground station infrastructure, pay by the minute to use AWSs and focus your limited resources back in your product which differentiate your space mission. And that's just been powerful. How's that going from a customer standpoint? It's going great. It's going great. We continue to grow. We added another location recently and just in the last week we announced a license accelerator. One of the things our customers told us is it takes too long to work with global governments to get license to operate around the world. And we know that's been the case. So we put together a team that leaned in to solve that problem and we just announced the license accelerator where we will work with companies to walk them through that process and we can shave an 18 month process into a three or four month process. And that's been, we've gotten great response on that from our customers. I mean, I've always said, I remember when you were hired and the whole space thing was happening, I remember saying to myself, man, if democratization can bring, come to space. And that's, we're seeing that happen. We're starting, you guys are doing it. And it really props to your team. Making space available to more and more people and they'll dazzle us with the innovative ways we use space. 10 years ago we couldn't have envisioned those things I told you about earlier. Now we're opening up all sorts of workloads. And John, real quick, one of the reasons is in the past you had to have a specific forte or expertise in working with space data because it was so unique and formatted and in pipeline systems we're making that democratized. So it's just like any other data, like apps on your phone. If you can build apps for your phone and manage data, we want to make it that easy to operate with space data. And that's going to change the way the industry operates. And that's fundamentally, that's great innovation because you're enabling that. So I have to ask you on that note of the innovation trends that you see or activities, what excites you the most? So a lot of things, but I'll give you two examples very quickly. One is high performance compute. We're seeing more and more companies really lean in to understanding how fast they can go on AWS. I told you about Leo Labs, eight hours to 10 seconds. But that high performance compute is going to be a game changer. The other thing is did, well, and real quick, I want to tell you Descartes Labs. So Descartes Labs came to us and said we want to compete in the annual global top 500 supercomputer challenge. And so we worked with them for a couple of weeks. We built a workload on the AWS standard platform. We came in number 40 in the globe for the top 500 supercomputer list just by building some workloads on our standard platform. That's powerful high performance compute. But the second example I wanted to give you is digital modeling, digital simulation, digital engineering. Boom Aerospace is a company, Boom that we work with. Boom decided to build their entire supersonic, commercial supersonic aircraft, digital engineering on the AWS cloud. In the last three years, John, they've executed 6,000 years of high performance compute. In the last three years, how do you do 6,000 years of compute in three years? You spin up thousands of AWS servers simultaneously. Let them do your digital management, digital analysis, digital design, bring back a million different perturbations of a wing structure and then pick the one that's best and then come back tomorrow and run it again. That's powerful. And that was not even possible. And years ago. Not at that speed. No, not at that speed. And that's what it's really opening up in terms of innovation. Okay, so now you've done it so much in your career. Okay, now you're here with Amazon. Looking back on this past year or so, what's the learnings for you? The learnings is truly how valuable cloud can be to the space industry. I'll admit to you, most people in the space industry and especially in the government space industry, if you ask us a year ago, two years ago, hey, what do you think about cloud? We would have said, well, you know, I hear people talk about the cloud. There's probably some value. We should probably look at that. And I was in the same boat, but now that I've dug deeply into the cloud and understand the value of artificial intelligence, machine learning, advanced data analytics, ground station infrastructure, all those things, I'm more excited than ever before about what the space industry can benefit from cloud computing. And so bringing that customer by customer is just a really fulfilling way to continue to be part of the space industry, even though I retired from government service. Is there, is there just, I'm just curious because you brought it up. Is there a lot of people coming in from the old, into space industry from public sector? Are they coming into commercial? Is the commercial rising up? And there's, I mean, I know there's a lot of public-private partnerships, but there's a lot of partnerships, but we're seeing an interesting trend. You know, it used to be that NASA led the way in science and technology, or the military led the way in science and technology, and they still do in some areas, and then the commercial industry would follow along. We're seeing that's reversed. There's so much growth in the commercial industry, so much money, venture capital being poured in, and so many innovative solutions being built, for instance, on the cloud, that now the commercial industry is leading technology and building new technology trends that the military and the DOD and their government are trying to take advantage of. And that's why you're seeing all these commercial contracts being led from Air Force, Space Force, NASA and NRO to take advantage of that commercialization. You like your job? I love my job. I could tell. I love my job. I mean, it is a cool job. I kind of want to work for you. John, space is cool. That's our tagline. Space is cool. Space is cool. Space equals ratings in the digital TV realm. It is really super exciting. A lot of young people are interested. I mean, robotics clubs in high schools are now varsity sports. And it all blends. These sports, all blend together. Space, robotics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, advanced analytics, it's all becoming a singular sector today, and it's open to more people than ever before for the reasons we talked about. Big wave, and you guys are building the surfboards. Everyone arrived. Congratulations. It's great to see you in person. Thank you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Thanks for having us. Clint Crozier is the director of AWS Aerospace and Satellite Legend in the industry now at AWS. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thanks for watching.