By Ron Faith
We are getting ready to make our annual pilgrimage to Logan, Utah for the Small Satellite Conference. It is one of our favorite conferences of the year. This year’s theme is “Missions at Scale” and we think that is an excellent theme for where the space industry is at right now.
At RBC Signals, we get to witness our customer across many phases of their growth. Everything from test and demonstration missions, to deploying their initial constellation, to building on an existing constellation or replacing older satellites in their existing constellation. Here are some observations that we are seeing and how the ground segment is responding.
More satellites going up on the same launch creates a unique set of challenges for launch and early operations (LEOP). From a ground perspective, you have to acquire all the satellites, communicate with them to determine their health, and start the early shakeout to make sure the satellites are performing as planned. What that means for our customers is that they need to plan for needing more capacity in more locations from ground stations during this critical period. All too often, we see customers think they can get away with one station while trying to acquire a half dozen or more satellites in LEOP. The reality is everything doesn’t always go according to plan and having the ability to talk with multiple satellites multiple times a day from multiple locations is a healthy practice and then once you get to normal operations, you can always throttle back on the amount of antenna time you need.
Second, many other industries such as shipping and aviation use mature financing such as equipment financing to scale their businesses. RBC Signals recently entered into a partnership with Libra Group to provide equipment financing for our next 20+ ground stations. The space industry needs to get more capital-efficient like other infrastructure industries in order to scale. We collectively need to remove large CAPEX hurdles while entering the scaling phase. By leasing ground station infrastructure, it is possible to scale in a much more cashflow-friendly manner.
We are amazed at how some of our customers are growing and can see how their needs in the future are only going to grow. It is important to plan for scaling and capacity knowing that it might not be a smooth curve up while the industry deals with growing pains.
If you are going to be at SmallSat in Logan, Utah, please feel free to come by our booth or attend our seminar on Monday morning. We are happy to discuss how we can help scale your missions with flexible, worldwide ground station assets. We look forward to seeing you.