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The Annual AIAA Small Satellite conference in Utah, bringing together industry, government and academia, is just a week away and in relation to that we talked with KSAT President and CEO Rolf Skatteboe about the growing SmallSat market, and how KSAT as a company adapts to this new market segment:

“As a company, KSAT has become the world largest provider of ground station services. To get there, innovation has always been a key factor behind all our activities. Further development of our services together with new and existing customers is what brings forward new and cost effective solutions to the market.

We have been in this business for a long time now and this close cooperation with our clients is highly important to us. We don’t believe in introducing a readymade general product to the market, we believe in an adaptation to the market needs, and then you will have your product – this is why we have made KSAT Light.

KSAT Light is a service specially fashioned to the emerging SmallSat market. We have looked at how to reduce the operations costs, while still ensuring reliable access to ground station services and reliable data delivery by reusing our rugged infrastructure and 24/7-operational concept.

I believe in specializing in what you are good at; we are really good at making satellite ground networks and other companies are really good at making small satellites and new sensors and that is why I am very happy to present KSAT light to this market, and what better than to bring it to the largest event in the SmallSat world, the AIAA Small Satellite conference in Utah.

I actually gave a presentation at the conference back in 1992 and I am really impressed by the enormous growth and development since then, both the event in particular and the SmallSat industry in general. At KSAT we are looking forward to this years´ event and the exciting times in this market in the coming years, I mean, the satellites may be small but we have big expectations!” Offering significantly reduced service prices, KSAT Light retains the market leading characteristics of the KSAT ground station network:

  • Mid-latitude sites for low-inclination orbits and extremely low latency polar orbit downloads
  • Optical fiber data backhaul from all sites, except Antarctica (Troll) which uses a high-capacity
  • Highly automated operations through the KSAT Tromsø Network Operations Center (TNOC)