By Abbey White, Staff Writer, SatNews
Dispatch from SmallSat Symposium. Coverage and analysis from across the conference, tracking the forces shaping the next phase of the SmallSat market.
Rockets function reliably. Satellites roll off assembly lines at scale. Yet the buzz at SmallSat Symposium in Mountain View can’t mask a sobering reality: data gets stuck on the way down.
Participants in the Ground Segment Evolution and Future session dispensed with visionary rhetoric to discuss the gritty mechanics of keeping the space economy online. A clear consensus emerged that the ground segment has evolved from a simple utility into the orbital ecosystem’s single greatest choke point. SpaceX has solved the launch problem, but the terrestrial pipes for downcasting that data increasingly clog with the mass of the digital tsunami.
The disconnect between orbital speed and terrestrial inertia is palpable. Satellite operators deploy new assets in months, but ground infrastructure faces a much longer timeline. Referring to the deployment of new optical ground stations, Greg Johnson, Director of Business Development at SSC Space, noted the “cost to being on the front end of that.” Ground Lag, defined by the time required to secure real estate and permits, is now measured in years rather than weeks.
The Volume Crisis
Volume acts as the primary driver of this backed-up pressure. Sporadic contacts for demonstration missions are a thing of the past. Giovanni Pandolfi Bortoletto, co-founder of Leaf Space, described a fundamental alteration in the market’s metabolism. “The really big change that we see in the last five years is volume,” Pandolfi Bortoletto said. “For years we were probably supporting, like, a couple of customers. . . . Now we’re doing 30 times that value.”
Such intensification forces a ruthless industrialization of the ground segment. The industry has abandoned the bespoke one-dish, one-satellite model for a highly automated, virtualized architecture where ground stations act as server nodes in a distributed cloud. That transition to software-defined infrastructure brings fragility, however. The sector still reels from the July 2025 Starlink outage, where a software control plane failure blacked out the network for 2.5 hours. That event served as a stark reminder that virtualization creates single points of failure on a planetary scale.
Security consequently has moved from afterthought to survival requirement. Ron Faith, CEO of RBC Signals, emphasized that rigorous compliance is the baseline for government customers: “We conform to the NIST 800-171 cybersecurity framework in order to do that.” Ground stations, he argued, must be viewed now as hybrid data centers serving as the terrestrial edge of the cloud.
The Existential Identity Crisis
The panel also hinted at a deeper dispute brewing in the sector whether a modern satellite even needs a ground station. Eyal Trachtman, VP at Addvalue, represented the disruptive view that “the best ground station is a satellite.” His company’s Inter-Satellite Data Relay System bypasses terrestrial dishes entirely for critical command and control by using GEO satellites to maintain a persistent link.
“The name of the game is persistence and low latency,” Trachtman asserted. The technology described provides a solution for real-time tasking that terrestrial networks cannot match. He conceded that the technology “cannot compete with the high bandwidth that ground stations provide” for massive data dumps, but its threat to the traditional telemetry business model is real. If operators shift their heartbeat data to relay networks, ground station providers lose a reliable revenue stream and are left to compete solely on the commoditized bulk data market.
The Flight to Quality
Amid the commoditization of Low Earth Orbit services, a flight to quality has emerged as the only clear path to high margins. With LEO a volume game, panelists promoted the cislunar economy as premium infrastructure’s new frontier.
Greg Johnson highlighted SSC Space’s critical role in the recent Firefly Blue Ghost mission, which successfully landed on the moon in March 2025. This mission was a data hose rather than a simple flag-planting exercise. “We set a record for 10 megabits from the lunar surface,” Johnson stated, adding that they pulled down “multiple gigabytes from the moon.” That success validates the commercial model for deep space communications and proves private companies can deliver performance previously reserved for NASA’s Deep Space Network.
The Message
Operational discipline now defines the mood in Mountain View. The speculative era of erecting antennas and hoping for customers has ended. The market has bifurcated. Companies are either low-cost, automated utilities fighting for pennies in the LEO volume pit, or high-assurance providers keeping lunar landers connected. As Ron Faith observed regarding the state of the industry’s legacy hardware, “We saw a lot of aging infrastructure failing.”
The message to the industry is clear: Either fix the plumbing or the space economy stalls.