Who actually builds these stations
Every station record carries the organisations that built it, broken out by role: who supplied the telescope, the mount, the comms terminal, the modem, the adaptive optics, and who integrated the whole thing. Aggregated across the registry, that answers a question the press releases don't — which suppliers have delivered, as opposed to announced. Counts below are computed live from the station records and cover only the 39 stations with documented supplier data.
Three ways a station gets built
The registry does not show one dominant supplier model. It shows three of comparable size, and which one an operator picks says more about the station than its aperture does. The three overlap rather than partition the registry — a station can buy a specialist terminal and mount it on a stock commercial telescope — so the figures below are not meant to sum.
Suppliers by stations delivered
One row per organisation, counting each station it contributed to in any role. A station with four named suppliers counts once for each of them, so the column totals more than the station count. Expand a row for the stations themselves.
| Supplier | Class | Base | Roles filled | Stations |
|---|
What the counts show
The most-used supplier in the registry doesn't sell optical communications. PlaneWave Instruments, a commercial astronomy telescope manufacturer, appears on more stations than any other single vendor — supplying the telescope, and sometimes the mount, into builds where somebody else provides the comms chain. Optical ground stations are, more often than the marketing suggests, an observatory telescope with a laser terminal behind it.
But that mode is concentrated, not general. Read it as a procurement pattern belonging to particular programmes rather than an industry-wide default.
Operators still build their own. That matters for anyone reading station counts as a market: a substantial share of the installed base was never a sale, and never will be.
Specialist vendors lead on the terminal, not the structure. Cailabs, Safran Data Systems, Mynaric, Astrolight and DiGOS mostly appear as terminal, modem or integrator — the parts that make a telescope into a comms asset. The split is visible in the roles column above, and it is why a single "manufacturer" field was too blunt to answer any of this.
Coverage gap. Those records are excluded from every figure on this page rather than counted as zero. The gap is not evenly distributed, which is itself a finding: it clusters in jurisdictions that publish little procurement detail.
If you operate or supplied one of these, the contribute form takes a correction with a source, and station operators can confirm a whole record through operator verification.
How this is built
Each record's hardware.suppliers array lists organisations by canonical name, with one or more roles from a fixed set: telescope, mount, enclosure, terminal, modem, adaptive optics, integrator, prime, in-house. Canonical names and aliases live in vendors.json, so a company published as "DiGOS GmbH" in one source and "DiGOS Potsdam" in another counts once. Supplier claims carry source citations on the station record like every other field.
Vendor home country and class are descriptive reference data used for grouping, not sourced registry claims — the sourced facts are on the stations. Class boundaries are judgement calls at the edges: a company can sell both telescopes and terminals, and is filed under the one that describes its core market. See the methodology for the sourcing bar.