Constellations recently spoke with Ron Faith, the President and CEO of RBC Signals, a global satellite data and communications provider. He answered questions about the state of the ever-growing smallsat industry, as well as how GSaaS providers support satellite launches and provide secure data delivery. Listen to the full podcast episode or continue reading for a few takeaways from the discussion.

Takeaway: New smallsat operators often encounter regulatory obstacles when preparing for launch.

Satellite operators often consider communications and ground support as the last step in getting a satellite operational, but ground segment providers suggest that potential customers approach them anywhere from a year to eighteen months in advance, and Faith agrees. “It’s because of regulatory [requirements],” he said. “Each of the ground stations have to be licensed for your spacecraft with the FCC in the U.S., or with whatever regulatory authorities there are around the world. Oftentimes that can take nine plus months to get through the process.”

Faith recommends that smallsat operators engage with ground station providers at least a year in advance, “so that we can get you through the regulatory process, so that your ground station is ready on the day of your launch.” The planning component is also important in other ways—by engaging early, looking at capacity in terms of how many passes a day you want to take, and how many customers will be on a given antenna, smallsat operators and Ground-as-a-Service (GSaaS) can better plan for capacity needs.

Takeaway: Satellite launches require adequate testing time to avoid common technical failures.

“They need to leave enough time in advance of the launch to do thorough testing, in particular radio compatibility testing,” Faith said, which includes compatibility between what they’re flying on the satellite, the frequencies being used, modulation and coding, and the ground station. “All too often with new space operators, they’ll test what they fly, but then after they’re done testing, they tweak something,” Faith said. “We really appreciate folks that test what they’re doing and then don’t touch it after it’s working.”

Faith has other suggestions for new smallsat operators. “One of the things we encourage them to do is put something as simple as UHF [ultra high frequency] on their spacecraft,” he said. “That way, when you launch in early operations with a UHF antenna, you can hit the broad side of a barn and you can find your satellite quickly.” This allows an operator to find and communicate with their satellite soon after launch.

GSaaS operators like RBC Signals help smallsat companies significantly when dealing with unknown unknowns. “Unfortunately, some new space companies learn these [lessons] the hard way,” said Faith. “But we try to help them not to.”

Takeaway: GSaaS and other commercial satellite data services are becoming a foundational aspect of defense infrastructure.

Defense infrastructure is quickly adopting smallsats and GSaaS services. “It wasn’t that long ago that DoD customers called smallsats ‘crapsats’,” Faith said. “They don’t do that today. They are adopters of [smallsats] as a platform.” Commercial services are essential suppliers of defense, especially as military and government satellite systems become overloaded. “The Air Force Signal and Control Network is oversubscribed, because the government is launching so many missions to go to space and try out new satellites and capabilities,” said Faith. Commercial providers can ease some of that strain by testing and demonstrating satellites or communicating with traditional satellites in moments when it is difficult to get antenna time on missions of record, or even by providing SDA capabilities.

Takeaway: Secure data processing at the ground station is a draw for government customers.

GSaaS providers that can provide secure data center processing will also be in high demand among government customers. “Ground stations themselves are becoming mini data centers,” said Faith. “Increasingly, we’re seeing workloads in microservices, secure containers deployed at the ground stations, so that the encrypted traffic comes into that. They decrypt it inside their secure container, they perform whatever logic they want to, they create advanced data products, they re-encrypt those and then come out of the container.” And all of this remains secure, even from the ground station operator themselves. “We never have to see those things, nor do we want to,” said Faith.

To illustrate the security of these ground systems, Faith gives the example of a secure ground station that RBC Signals recently built. “We built a government customer a ground station in a shipping container,” he said. “It’s a containerized solution, both hardware and software, and so it’s got a little mini data center in it.” The mobile ground station included Starlink antennas on top of the shipping container and a slide for the antennas to come out on. And not only is it a secure, contained data center, but it can also work on a ship while at sea, using telemetry tracking from anywhere in the world.

For more on GSaaS for smallsats, including multi-orbit capabilities and building scalable solutions for the expected uptick in satellite launches, listen to our full conversation here.

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