By Ron Faith
RBC Signals had the good fortune to participate in Aerospace Corporation’s Ground Systems Architectures Workshop (GSAW) this past week in Los Angeles, California. This is an annual gathering of ground systems professionals that get together to discuss common challenges facing the ground systems community and share new developments and approaches to those challenges. Once again, it was a great series of days with some key takeaways.
- Commercial, commercial, commercial – while there are a large number of government stakeholders that attend GSAW, one common theme was that many of the new innovations and approaches were coming from the commercial world and then being modified to address government challenges. What is commonly referred to as “dual-use” was in many presentations and sessions. Just as SpaceX brought tremendous innovation to government customers, we are now seeing many other companies doing the same.
- Systems Engineering vs. Software Engineering – ground systems are a fascinating intersection of systems engineering and software engineering. While systems engineering is still highly valued, there was recognition that innovative software engineering approaches from agile development process to AI/ML are coming to dominate.
- The future is so bright, we are going to need shades (for the lasers) – while ground systems are still very much concerned with radio frequency (RF) issues, we are seeing the adoption of optical communication technologies. Optical terminals are now flying on many satellites for high data rate intersatellite communications and now that there are enough optical terminals in orbit there is increasing interest in using optical directly to the ground. Higher data rates are required for orbital data centers and new earth observation sensors. These new, higher data rates to the ground will be addressed by high frequency bands (Ka, Q, V, E) and optical.
- Ground Stations as a Service (GSaaS) goes mainstream – there is increased adoption of the “as a service” model for ground. This is being driven by a desire to move CAPEX to OPEX by many customers including government. It is also the case that the commercial GSaaS providers have improved their offerings with more apertures, supported frequency bands, security, and service levels.
We look forward to participating again next year and continuing to have meaningful interactions with this often overlooked, but incredibly important engineering community.