Orbital Gate · Infrastructure
Sovereign ground for every challenger constellation.
Orbital Gate is building country-owned ground stations that will ship as containers, and the Network OS that will run them as one regional network. Operators will book time on the nodes their licence allows, each owner will set the rules, and each minute carried will be signed and settled.
- Status
- In development
- Layer
- Infrastructure
- Model
- Country-owned nodes, one network
- Station design
- ISO 40ft high-cube container
- Telemetry formats
- CCSDS, AX.25, KISS
Countries want their ground back.
Outside the US, only six countries receive Landsat 8 and 9 directly on their own stations. Starlink runs its own gateways.
Orbital Gate will give each country the ground segment: a national ground station the country owns, financed if needed, joined to a network that will book, meter and settle each pass, with the owner deciding who may use the node and where data lands.
What the Network OS will do
Scheduler and stitched contacts
Will allocate time, beams and spectrum across the network's nodes, and build one contact from segments on two nodes when neither covers the window alone.Delegated authority and proof of pass
Each node will receive a signed, time-boxed segment. A contact will have one uplink token, and only the node holding it can transmit. Each node will sign its segment, and the network will sign the whole contact.Settlement
Owners will be paid for the minutes their node carried, calculated from the signed record.Sovereignty policy and failover
Owners will decide who may use a node and which partners it may stitch with. If a node fails, its bookings will move to other nodes licensed to carry them.Gateway hosting
Constellations will be able to lease gateway capacity on the same sites. Leased capacity comes out of the shared pool.
At each station, connectors will read CCSDS space packets, AX.25 and KISS frames, and the gateway will authenticate callers through Orbital Passport. Related in the portfolio: Orbital Twin, digital twins for satellites.
The Network OS, step by step.
The four-minute walkthrough steps through how the software will handle one satellite operator's 23 GB pass: stitched across two country-owned stations, signed, and paid to each owner for the minutes it carried.
One container, five bays.
Each station design fits inside a standard ISO 40ft high-cube shipping container, divided into five bays from end to end.
NOC
Operator positions and displays.Compute
Racks for processing and storage.RF
Radios, converters, amplifiers and a reference clock.Power
A battery store behind an automatic transfer switch.HVAC + I/O
Cooling, and the shore power, data and fibre connections.
Configurations range from a single tracking dish for low Earth orbit to ground-mounted dishes for GEO and MEO links. The design details are shared through the station viewer.
See the station designs.
An interactive 3D viewer of the station designs is available by access code. It asks for your name, your email and the code.
Questions
Is Orbital Gate available?
Not yet. It is in development.
Who owns a station?
A national ground station the country owns, financed if needed. The owner will decide who may use the node and where its data lands.
Which telemetry formats will it read?
CCSDS space packets, AX.25 and KISS. Connectors will be plugins, so other formats can be added.
How do I see the station viewer?
Write to [email protected] and ask for an access code. The viewer asks for your name, your email and the code.
Running ground stations?
Tell the team which stations, bands and telemetry formats you work with.