Why It Matters
As satellite constellations proliferate, traditional ground‑station models can’t scale to the volume and speed required, making automated, API‑driven services essential for rapid data access and cost efficiency. This episode shows how legacy space firms are adapting to meet the needs of emerging commercial players, signaling a broader industry move toward more agile, cloud‑integrated space infrastructure.
Key Takeaways
- •SSC Space Go automates ground station access via customer APIs.
- •Service targets small‑sat constellations needing low‑latency data.
- •Software‑defined radios and virtualization enable rapid global deployment.
- •Standardized antennas and Ka‑band add capacity and speed.
- •Cloud backbones reduce payload latency to minutes worldwide.
Pulse Analysis
SSC Space, a Swedish aerospace veteran with more than five decades of ground‑segment experience, has launched SSC Space Go to meet the exploding demand from commercial small‑sat operators. Traditionally, the company offered a high‑touch, large‑aperture service for government agencies and big‑budget missions. Today, the rise of dozens‑wide constellations and cheaper launch opportunities forces a shift toward on‑demand, API‑driven access. SSC Space Go positions the firm at the forefront of this transition, delivering a subscription‑style ground‑station‑as‑a‑service that lets customers schedule passes, retrieve data, and manage operations without human intermediaries.
The new platform relies on software‑defined radios, digitizers and the Kratos OpenSpace virtualization layer to turn antennas into programmable resources. By standardizing on a single antenna family and using cloud‑based back‑haul, SSC Space Go can provision new sites in days rather than months and push payload files to customers within minutes. Ka‑band hardware is being added to broaden bandwidth, while machine‑to‑machine APIs give users full control over scheduling and telemetry extraction. This architecture eliminates costly hardware swaps, reduces downtime, and scales effortlessly as constellations grow from tens to hundreds of satellites.
SSC Space Go is aimed at new‑space players that already operate or plan constellations of dozens to hundreds of LEO satellites. The automated, low‑latency service cuts ground‑segment costs by up to 80 % compared with traditional white‑glove contracts, while delivering data to cloud environments in near‑real time. With five sites live at launch and a roadmap that includes additional Ka‑band stations across Europe, the United States and Asia, the company can quickly expand coverage to match customer demand. This agility gives operators the reliability of multiple ground‑station providers without locking into a single vendor, accelerating mission timelines and supporting the next wave of commercial space services.
Episode Description
SSC Space has a mission to help its customers access space — whether that's spacecraft operations and engineering, operating the Esrange launch center in Sweden, or its global ground network. With 54 years of operations, SSC Space has deep experience in space missions.
Now, the company is expanding its ground systems business with SSC Space Go, designed for commercial companies with small satellites in LEO. This week, On Orbit hosts Jonas Åslund, product manager, and Viktor Pankov, product owner, of SSC Space Go to hear about how the service was designed to meet the needs of the evolving commercial space market.
Both Åslund and Pankov are ground segment experts, and they share the hardware and software upgrades that went into the service, and how it's designed to enable greater automation and flexibility.
This episode of On Orbit is brought to you by SSC Space, a leading global provider of advanced space services in science, ground segment, rocket test and launch services.
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