KSAT, the company known for downlinking satellite data and operating the largest commercial ground station network, plans to expand its network to space with its upcoming Hyper network of relay satellites.
The need for lower latency drove KSAT’s decision, explains Edvard Foss, KSAT vice president of Hyper, who spoke with Via Satellite during the Small Satellite Conference in Utah about why the ground segment company decided it was time to expand its reach into orbit.
“Latency was the real problem. The way to deal with it without building ground stations in the Pacific or the Atlantic or in hostile places is to put it in space. The idea was to take everything we do really well with KSATlite and put it into a satellite closer to the customer and provide real-time connectivity when they need it,” Foss said.
The Hyper network is designed for both radio frequency and optical connectivity, to support real-time tasking, telemetry, tracking, and command (TT&C), point-to-point communications, and low latency data downlink.
“Everyone wants it yesterday,” Foss said. “We got very strong indications from a large portion of important customers that have been pushing us into this opportunity. Right now we just need to build faster.”
After announcing plans for Hyper a year ago, KSAT is in the process of selecting a manufacturer and industrial partners for the constellation. Timing on that decision is to be announced, Foss said. The operational satellites will be in the range of 500- to 700 kilograms.
The constellation will be deployed in loops of 12 to 16 interconnected spacecraft, based on demand. The first loop will be deployed where KSAT’s customers are the most dense, and it will be expanded based on demand, he said.
“We’re looking for a company that can deliver as much capability as possible within the schedule that we need to deliver. We need a solution that’s able to make this into a viable business at scale and we also need security in terms of deployment schedules,” Foss said.
KSAT recently announced two demonstration satellites called Hyperion, which will be equipped with optical terminals from Rocket Lab’s Mynaric and Sony Space Communications Corp. (SSCC). Foss said this mission will demonstrate the radio frequency (RF) capabilities TT&C, real-time tasking, high-throughput downlink with Ka-band and Earth Observation downlink bands. It will also demonstrate optical services and on-orbit compute.
KSAT has not disclosed who is building the two pathfinder satellites but Foss said it is a U.S.-based company and the satellites are in the range of 300- to 400 kilograms. Hyperion is planned for launch on a SpaceX rideshare mission in late 2027.
With two optical terminal providers, Foss noted it is important for the service to support optical standards from the Space Development Agency (SDA) in the U.S. and European standards as well.
For KSAT customers, Hyper will be compatible with existing radios and antennas onboard satellites, anything that KSAT already supports.
Foss explained the Hyper relay capability will be available to all of KSAT’s customers, and the customer can decide when real-time downlink is needed.
“Real-time delivery data is maybe not needed for all your data. That’s why we want to augment the ground network rather than compete with the ground network,” he said. “Our customers will still use direct-to-ground as their core downlink solution, and then this will [serve] ad hoc.”
Real-time downlink is of particular interest for defense use cases, where end users have very strict latency requirements for applications like intelligence, reconnaissance, surveillance (ISR) and targeting. These requirements are only getting more stringent.
“It’s very binary when you go down to the low low latencies — you either have the data in time or you don’t. It’s worthless if it’s not delivered within that timeline,” Foss said. “We have strong interest in getting that [timeline] down to zero. I think we are going to see a world where data delivered five minutes after capture is not going to be interesting.”
Expanding into relay satellites comes amid a broader push for KSAT to deliver integrated mission services to customers beyond ground network services to include satellite operations and data processing. The company established a satellite network operations center in Norway and currently operates 17 satellites for five customers, with 20 more satellites in the pipeline. It also plans to establish a network operations center in Denver.
Deploying assets in space marks a “huge shift” for the company, Foss said.
“We have supported customers as KSAT for more than 20 years. I think the timing is right,” he said. “We see this as an extension of what we are already doing — working with great partners to take away a lot of the risk and complexity of going into space. It’s absolutely a major shift. It’s not easy, but we’re doing it in a way that’s comfortable.”
