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Ground Station Operators Look to Software for Simplicity in Smallsat Operations
In today’s brave new space world, smallsat companies can outsource everything. Launch is a given, and even satellite buses can now be bought off the shelf or rented as part of a space-infrastructure-as-a-service offering. The ground can be outsourced, but as with cloud computing, the simplicity and low cost promised by ground outsourcing doesn’t always materialize, smallsat operators say.

Even with a third-party provider, wrangling the ground segment remains difficult and complex. Abstracting that complexity away from the customer remains the holy grail for ground-station-as-a-service startups as they scale to meet the burgeoning demand from new space companies. To maximize…[continued]