orbitlink.ink

OrbitLink.

Continuous ground for the long tail of orbit.

What we do
§ 01 · What we doOperations layer for the missions left behind

We operate the satellites that the enterprise ground-segment market priced out.

A small team with a great payload should be able to fly a successful mission without an in-house RF department, a half-million-dollar dish, or a year-long spectrum filing.

We run the antennas, the link budgets, the spectrum coordination, the modems, the 24-hour ops desk — so universities, early-stage operators, and sovereign science programs can focus on the experiment, the sensor, the science. We sell missions that come home with data, not minutes on a dish.

§ 02 · Why the market needs usThe bottleneck moved. Nobody built the layer that replaces it.

Launch is no longer the gate. Operations is.

For sixty years, getting to orbit was the hard part. As of this year, it isn't. The economics of running a mission once you're up there are now the bottleneck — and the industry hasn't caught up.

85%
Drop in launch cost per kilogram

SpaceX Falcon 9 brought $/kg to LEO from a $18,500 historical average down to $2,700. Starship is targeting another 99% reduction. Per SpaceX's May 2026 S-1 filing.

~50%
University CubeSats that fail to return data

Half of first-time university missions never deliver useful science — almost always because the team couldn't operate a healthy spacecraft from a campus dish. Swartwout, CubeSat Reliability Database.

89%
Of commercial smallsats owned by 7 operators

The other 11% is hundreds of universities, startups, and sovereign programs — each priced out of enterprise GSaaS, each lacking in-house RF expertise. BryceTech, 2025.

Cheap launch democratized the satellite. Nobody democratized the link back down.

§ 03 · Who we serveThe long tail that built this industry

Built for the people who invented the smallsat — and were then squeezed out of operating it.

01 · Universities & research labs

Science missions that survive their grad students.

NSF/NASA CubeSat science projects, ESA Fly Your Satellite teams, planetary and heliophysics swarms. We replace the campus rooftop dish, the student-built modem, and the institutional knowledge that walks out the door at graduation.

02 · Early-stage smallsat startups

Pathfinder missions that close the next round.

One or two satellites, no in-house ops team, an investor demo on the calendar. We give you continuous comms, real-time anomaly response, and fast commissioning — so a healthy spacecraft never goes dark on a Friday night.

03 · Sovereign space programs

National missions with sovereign data control.

Emerging-nation space agencies and ministries that buy turnkey satellites but need an operations layer that doesn't route their data through someone else's infrastructure. We let nations operate their own sky.

§ 04 · ReadingThe full thesis, audited

Why now — and why this didn't happen ten years ago.

Launch is no longer the gate; operations is. We made the full argument in our first whitepaper — backed by Cal Poly + Stanford's original CubeSat work, Swartwout's reliability data, NASA's State-of-the-Art smallsat report, and SpaceX's own May 2026 S-1 filing.

Whitepaper №01 · May 2026
Give space back to the curious.
~3,800 words · 39 sourced citations · 8 min read
Read it