So the question is what are the major bottlenecks and what technologies can we use from open source and other sectors to reduce cost per MW and ensure system safety
Automation changes the failure unit: one operator mistake once affected one spacecraft, while a policy mistake in fleet software can propagate across a constellation. The scaling problem is governance as much as compute.
The article description about standardization is fundamentally wrong. Standardization is possible and relatively easy and it is not implemented basically because of lack of talent rather than differences between the payloads/sensors/interfaces. Note that Ground Software engineers are scarce worldwide. CCSDS is not an "old" standard but it is actually what ANY mature company transitions to when they reach maturity. File transfers, encryption, data consistency or simply automation are well described in this standard an senior engineers know that. There are efforts on the standardization and open source community such as Yamcs, Grafana or FPrime to make things easy and robust, so articles like this do not help to educate decision makers on what is available and what is really important. No, self-developing ground infrastructure is NOT a good decision in any context, especially the economic one, but most importantly it is a risky mistake that has resulted in many missions lost.
I totally agree that self-developing ground infrastructure is a difficult and often unnecessary path - that's actually one of the points in the article: more companies are moving toward ground-station-as-a-service instead of building it themselves.
On standards - thank you for the comment, we're always glad when specialists from the industry add insights like this!
And you're right, we're not trying to be the educational platform for decision-makers here :) But if you have thoughts on how we could contribute more meaningfully on this topic, let us know, maybe we could do something together.
If you'd be up for writing something about standardization efforts and open source - happy to collaborate on that
Thanks a lot for your comment and explanation. In fact some experts contacted me and corrected my statement as CCSDS has hardware interfaces that were not adopted yet by the industry. Happy to discuss further and contribute about this topic!
So the question is what are the major bottlenecks and what technologies can we use from open source and other sectors to reduce cost per MW and ensure system safety
Automation changes the failure unit: one operator mistake once affected one spacecraft, while a policy mistake in fleet software can propagate across a constellation. The scaling problem is governance as much as compute.
Totally agree. Any ideas how to avoid it? Sometimes it's impossible to detect this problems during the design phase
The article description about standardization is fundamentally wrong. Standardization is possible and relatively easy and it is not implemented basically because of lack of talent rather than differences between the payloads/sensors/interfaces. Note that Ground Software engineers are scarce worldwide. CCSDS is not an "old" standard but it is actually what ANY mature company transitions to when they reach maturity. File transfers, encryption, data consistency or simply automation are well described in this standard an senior engineers know that. There are efforts on the standardization and open source community such as Yamcs, Grafana or FPrime to make things easy and robust, so articles like this do not help to educate decision makers on what is available and what is really important. No, self-developing ground infrastructure is NOT a good decision in any context, especially the economic one, but most importantly it is a risky mistake that has resulted in many missions lost.
Hi, Alejandro!
I totally agree that self-developing ground infrastructure is a difficult and often unnecessary path - that's actually one of the points in the article: more companies are moving toward ground-station-as-a-service instead of building it themselves.
On standards - thank you for the comment, we're always glad when specialists from the industry add insights like this!
And you're right, we're not trying to be the educational platform for decision-makers here :) But if you have thoughts on how we could contribute more meaningfully on this topic, let us know, maybe we could do something together.
If you'd be up for writing something about standardization efforts and open source - happy to collaborate on that
Thanks a lot for your comment and explanation. In fact some experts contacted me and corrected my statement as CCSDS has hardware interfaces that were not adopted yet by the industry. Happy to discuss further and contribute about this topic!
I sent a request to LinkedIn!