Constellations spoke with Giovanni Pandolfi Bortoletto, the Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Leaf Space, headquartered in Milan, Italy, at the Small Sat conference in Logan, Utah.

While as-a-Service offerings have been around for some time in the IT world, it is a concept relatively new to space and even newer to European space. Pandolfi described GSaaS as “having infrastructure and a ground station network to communicate with satellites […] to make it easy for customers to access it and not actually own any asset, but to use it as much as they can to support their missions.”

GSaaS: It’s Not Just EO Anymore

Pandolfi was enthusiastic about prospects for GSaaS growth, as all existing and new constellations will need to get much of their data down to Earth. “We need to […] sell that data at some point on the ground to the end users. So in order to have that, you need a ground station network and you need ground station-as-a-service.”

There was a lot of early interest from the EO market, because it’s an application that is easily understood, but as Pandolfi states, “It’s not just EO, we have a lot of technology administration, communication, IoT, direct to device. So there’s a lot of new stuff.”

Orchestration of Assets Is Key to GSaaS

With Euroconsult forecasting over 20,000 small satellites to be launched over the next decade, Pandolfi is enthused about the growth opportunities. However, he is aware of the challenges such growth will bring, chief of which he believes is the ability to manage multiple operators. As Pandolfi sees it, “The focus for us is really to make it easier and easier to actually communicate with the space asset.” He adds, “This is done, really, from automation because without automation, without orchestration, we cannot scale. It doesn’t make sense to scale to 200, 300 people to actually just follow a few satellites.”

Pandolfi went on to explain that there are different ways of providing this kind of management. “Some players […] are focusing more on hosting capabilities,” he explained. “Others, like RBC Signals, Infostellar [use] third-party assets and apply services like that.”

Sometimes It Doesn’t Make Sense

When asked to describe his key learning takeaways from his GSaaS experience Pandolfi’s response was to the point: “Don’t do the stuff that you can avoid doing.” He explained that early on, Leaf Space built and managed their own antennas. He soon learned that approach was not providing much value. “We needed to focus where the value creation was and it was on the software and orchestration side and on the service,” he said. “I believe that was one of the main things that we needed to learn. Really focus on where you are actually putting much more impact on the market […]. We like building stuff, but sometimes it doesn’t make sense.”

To hear more about where satellite networks can benefit from terrestrial network experience and AI’s contribution to GSaaS, click here.