What’s unclear to me is, if any company can run their own satellite fleet, even micro ones, can they really not afford to run their own ground stations too?
What’s the target customer profile of this service exactly?
What’s the target customer profile of this service exactly?
The rule at Raytheon was that Lockheed got the easy end of the job — they just had to design, build, and launch the new fleet. It was Raytheon who got the really hard end of the job, because they had to be able to seamlessly manage both the new and old fleets.
I would submit that designing, building, and operating the ground control systems remains the hardest part of the job, even if you don’t have a legacy fleet of satellites that you have to manage on top of the new fleet.
Think about it — when you’re doing the operations side of the house, you have to be perfect, all the time. That one time you aren’t perfect and your opsec fails, you lose. The other guys just have to be right once, and they can keep trying and trying and trying indefinitely, until they get that one time they win. That’s definitely the harder job.
What's the threat model for a ground station? Interception? Sabotage? Hardware theft? Can you even sell these things on eBay?
Satellites and their attendant infrastructure cost billions of dollars to deploy and maintain. They are incredibly valuable targets, making it worth an attacker's while to penetrate them. This is way beyond simple vandalism or ransomware.
Not to mention just plain destruction of bringing down a fleet of satellites.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Midnight_broadcast_sig...
The core competency of a business you describe is building, launching and maintaining satellites. On-ground network infrastructure, computing hardware, data processing, machine learning etc. is something AWS is a lot more familiar with.