A ground-segment API you can read before you sign
Commercial ground-segment-as-a-service has a quiet convention: the interface arrives with the contract. You can read the marketing, you can read a datasheet, and you find out what the API actually looks like once you are a customer. That convention is load-bearing for anyone building against these vendors, because it means integration cost is unknowable until after the commercial decision is made.
SSC has broken it, in the useful direction.
What is published
Space Go is SSC's self-service offering on 4 m-class S/X/Ka antennas at five sites: Esrange in Sweden, Alaska, Inuvik in Canada, Western Australia, and Punta Arenas in Chile.
The documentation is open and unauthenticated, and it includes an External ICD, a full API reference, a hardware specification, terms, and — the part that matters most — a sandbox ICD.
Read from the reference rather than the marketing:
- A versioned base path, with a separately addressed sandbox environment.
- Authentication is HTTP Bearer with a JWT, or OAuth 2.0 authorization-code against a tenant token endpoint. There is no anonymous route.
- Endpoints cover contacts (list with time filtering, create, fetch, delete), contact availability, sites, spacecraft, spacecraft TLE upload and retrieval, service configuration, and post-contact reports.
The interesting omission
There is no pass-prediction endpoint, and the documentation is explicit that this is deliberate: the customer computes visibility from element sets and then validates the result against the availability endpoint.
That is worth dwelling on, because it is a statement about where the division of labour sits in this market. The vendor sells antenna time and tells you when it is free. Working out when a spacecraft is overhead is your problem, and the vendor assumes you have already solved it. Any architecture that expected the ground network to answer "when can I talk to my satellite" is building against an assumption these vendors do not share.
It also means an integration is two independent halves — your own propagation, and their availability — which can be built and tested separately. The sandbox makes the second half testable without a contract.
Where to read it
The terms are ordinary commercial contract language. Nothing in them restricts building against the sandbox.