Skynopy’s ground-station-as-a-service model is quickly gaining traction.
The company signed two agreements with French satellite manufacturer U-Space, announced today.
- U-Space tapped Skynopy to provide ground services for two sats already in LEO:
- SOAP, a demo sat aimed at improving France’s SSA capabilities;
- PANDORE, an in-orbit demo mission testing commercial and defense technologies.
- U-Space also selected Skynopy to collaborate on the development of new X-band comms capability for future U-Space sats. This aims to achieve higher data-throughput levels on smaller satellite platforms, under funding from the ESA PUSH program.
Good omen: U-Space operates three sats in orbit—SOAP, PANDORE, and NESS, a sat developed alongside CNES to detect terrestrial signal interference. But that number is poised to grow dramatically.
U-Space has more than a dozen satellites in production, and can churn out a sat per day at its new production facility. Today’s announcement suggests these future missions might create even more business between the two French startups.
“We intend to [keep working together],” U-Space CTO Cyril Brotons told Payload. “We have not signed the contract for the next one, but clearly for military missions, governmental missions where we need to have high data download…Skynopy can clearly be an asset.”
No competition: U-Space cofounder Antoine Ressouche said in a statement that Skynopy’s ground service is “the obvious choice” when compared to the rest of the market, and listed multiple capabilities where Skynopy stood out, including:
- Robust operations, which can eliminate lock-loss and resynchronization events during satellite passes;
- Real-time indicators—signal strength, signal-to-noise ratio, demodulation quality and data delivery latency—which Skynopy can share during each satellite pass.
- “Superior API,” which reduces integration timelines compared with other ground station operators.
- Technical responsiveness, where Skynopy’s support teams are on-call during critical phases of the mission.
And U-Space expects things will get better as Skynopy continues to build to offer more efficient communications systems.
“We are positioning our future satellites to deliver download performance our customers simply would not expect from a small satellite,” Ressouche said in a statement.
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Yesterday, Intuitive Machines announced a definitive agreement to acquire UK-based Goonhilly Earth Station, as well as Goonhilly’s US subsidiary COMSAT, to expand the lunar company’s offering in deep-space comms and PNT.
“Customers have been clear that they want a single, integrated, and resilient solution for their communications and PNT needs as they accelerate missions at an unprecedented pace,” Intuitive Machines’ CEO Steve Altemus said in a statement. “Goonhilly will provide the backbone for this network, [scale] our global ground presence, and will bring a strategic core competency to the Intuitive Machines team.”
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