Design and Implementation of a Secure and Sustainable Framework for Remote Ground Station Operations

The accelerating deployment of low Earth orbit constellations is driving demand for geographically dispersed, fiber‑independent ground stations. Although relocation to remote sites improves sky coverage, it also magnifies two coupled challenges of maintaining high operational availability when no staff is on‑site and safeguarding critical links against cyber‑threats. This thesis bridges the partial treatment of these issues in previous work by proposing and prototyping a cloud‑native communication framework that treats reliability and security as inseparable design goals. A mixed‑methods approach combined a systematic literature review with practitioner interviews at Arctic Space Technologies to derive functional requirements, after which a design‑science cycle produced a modular architecture centred on a Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) publish/subscribe backbone secured by Transport Layer Security (TLS) and broker‑level Access Control Lists (ACLs). The proof‑of‑concept implementation (Flask Application Programming Interface (API), Mosquitto, MySQL, InfluxDB and a Python Command‑Line Interface (CLI)) supports antenna booking, command dispatch, remote monitoring and autonomous fault‑recovery. Simulated passes and expert verification showed automatic fault‑recovery during system tests, and full traceability through pass‑type flags and waterfall plots. The resulting blueprint demonstrates that a single, lightweight message bus, persistent time‑series storage and role‑based access controls can deliver cloud‑scale elasticity without compromising situational awareness or security posture. These findings offer satellite operators a practical path toward resilient, cost‑effective “Ground‑station‑as‑a‑Service” networks and lay the groundwork for future integration of predictive‑maintenance analytics and container‑based scaling.