SSC introduces streamlined ground station service

BREMEN, Germany — Swedish Space Corp. has rolled out a new ground station service designed to provide streamlined support for operators of small satellites and constellations.

The company announced at Space Tech Expo Europe here Nov. 18 its SSC Go service, which uses a dedicated network of 3.7-meter antennas at five sites worldwide to provide S- and X-band communications, with Ka-band to follow next year.

The new service differs from SSC’s current ground station offerings, which use larger antennas. “We’ve very much been addressing more of a premium market with those services,” said Nick Priborsky, president of SSC’s Connect ground segment division, in an interview.

SSC Go is designed to compete with similar services such as Kongsberg Satellite Services’ KSATlite and Leaf Space. The emphasis is on streamlined, simplified service for customers of smaller satellites who, company officials said, don’t need the “white glove” support of SSC’s traditional offerings.

“Onboarding will be probably a little bit easier,” Priborsky said. The service will also offer machine-to-machine interfaces to automate scheduling of passes and transfer downlinked data into cloud computing services.

“We just see the demand out there, and it’s a market segment that so far we’ve not been able to address,” he said. “Now we have that possibility to address that market as well.”

Priborsky said he expects SSC Go to stand out from competitors in some technical aspects, such as dual-polarization X-band downlinks that can double data rates for satellites that support the capability. “Otherwise, we really do hope that, as we’re not the market leader, we can offer a very competitive price as well.”

Redundancy is also a selling point. “There’s some value from a risk management perspective not to take passes from just a single provider,” he said. “You never quite know nowadays: sea cables and terrestrial network communications can be damaged and brought down.”

SSC Go will start with five ground stations, four of them at high latitudes optimized for satellites in sun-synchronous orbits: Kiruna, Sweden; North Pole, Alaska; Inuvik, Canada; and Punta Arenas, Chile. The fifth is in Western Australia, which the company said was of interest to customers looking to quickly downlink data after passing over East Asia.

The company will consider expanding SSC Go to other ground stations in its network based on customer demand, Priborsky said.

He declined to say how many antennas will be available at each station. “There’s a lot of capacity that will be available,” he said. “We’re not starting just with a couple of antennas here and there. We do have some serious capacity we can start off with.”