Phased Array Radar Provides a Platform for Next-Generation Low Earth Orbiting Satellites

Decades in the past, satellite launches required a hefty budget from the design and build of the satellite to the launching of the massive piece of equipment. Fixed service satellites ground stations were also respectively massive, necessitating huge, failure-prone amplifiers for transmission. The entire system was essentially custom and necessarily bulky. The satellite market has recently seen a trend from fixed service satellites in geostationary orbit to mobile service satellites in low Earth orbit. Modern systems have scaled down quite a bit in size -- trading off mission time for streamlined manufacturing and modularity. As an example, the ground stations for the High Throughput Satellite ViaSat series have effectively halved their antenna diameter with each new iteration of satellite thereby lessening the price per station. The cost savings have, in turn, been transferred to more ground stations where ViaSat-3 will have 20 times more corresponding ground stations than the original ViaSat-1.