New Space is greedy for ground. Traditional Geostationary Earth Orbit (GEO) satellites are stationary relative to the Earth — they hang at a fixed point in the sky and a single ground station can be in constant line-of-sight contact. But the New Space non-GEO constellations — in Low- or Medium-Earth orbit (LEO or MEO) —…

RESTON, VA — The U.S. satellite sector must embrace modern software design practices like agile and DevSecOps if America’s space efforts are to remain ahead of foreign competitors like China, Nicolas Chaillan, the recently departed chief software officer of the U.S. Air Force told CyberSatGov this week. He said in his Thursday lunchtime keynote that…

Ground systems technology is years behind the satellites it supports and catching up will entail a fundamental transformation of the sector and the introduction of interoperable standards, panelists at SATELLITE 2021 said Wednesday, Sept. 8. “The technology improvements in the space layer over the last five to 10 years have been massive,” said Stuart Daughtridge,…

Faced with a steady decline in the price of their basic commodity, satellite operators have turned to vertical integration to drive efficiency savings and create new business models which capture more of the value chain. The price per unit of satellite bandwidth may be falling, but the revenue operators are able to earn from selling…