What is a ground station?
A satellite ground station (also called an earth station or teleport) is a terrestrial facility that communicates with satellites in orbit. It combines large dish antennas (or phased arrays for LEO), radio frequency (RF) equipment, signal processing hardware, and network interconnection to send uplink signals to a satellite and receive its downlink.
Types of ground stations
TT&C (Telemetry, Tracking and Command) stations are dedicated to spacecraft health monitoring and control — sending commands and receiving housekeeping data. Gateway stations handle user traffic, connecting the satellite network to the public internet or enterprise networks. User terminals (VSAT, flat-panel) are the smallest class, installed at customer premises. Gateway stations typically require large antennas (3–9 m for GEO Ka-band) and very high EIRP to serve entire satellite spot beams.
Ground station networks for LEO
A LEO satellite moves across the sky at ~7.6 km/s, remaining in view of any single ground station for only ~10 minutes per pass. Constellation operators therefore build distributed ground station networks — Starlink uses hundreds of gateway sites globally — or partner with ground station-as-a-service providers like AWS Ground Station, Leaf Space, or Kongsberg Satellite Services (KSAT) to aggregate third-party capacity.
Resilience and redundancy
Critical missions require geographically redundant ground stations to ensure continuous control even if one site experiences a power outage, antenna failure, or adverse weather. Polar ground stations (Svalbard, McMurdo) are particularly valuable for SSO satellites that overfly them on every orbit.