As the crewed spacecraft Artemis II rocket launched at 6:35 p.m. Eastern Time on July 1 from the United States — the first lunar mission in half a century — South Korea's satellite operations capabilities are being put to the test. KT SAT, a satellite subsidiary of KT Group, is conducting integrated mission control for K-RadCube, a Korean small scientific satellite aboard Artemis II.
In a recent interview with the Seoul Economic Daily at KT Tower in Gangnam-gu, Seoul, Kang Hee-suk, head of KT SAT's Service Planning Division, said, "We are performing integrated control and operations encompassing satellite command and ground station management for the national RadCube project."
KT SAT has built an integrated operations system to minimize uncertainties that can arise in the space environment and raise the success rate of the RadCube mission. "We aim to operate monitoring of the satellite's status and the reception, storage and relay of data from the satellite as a single system," Kang said. "To that end, we mobilized all of our satellite expertise — linking a total of five ground stations worldwide across the United States, Europe, Asia and South America, and independently developing dedicated software for analyzing space data."
The critical challenge of this mission is maintaining stable communication with the satellite in a highly elliptical orbit. K-RadCube will remain in high Earth orbit to measure cosmic radiation from the Van Allen radiation belts — the donut-shaped zones surrounding Earth — at various altitudes. The mission altitude varies dramatically from 200 to 70,000 kilometers. The observation data is expected to serve as foundational material for radiation shielding design and mission operation strategies in future crewed lunar landings and deep-space exploration.
"Unlike geostationary satellites, this requires responding to the satellite's position as it changes moment by moment, making the difficulty level very high," Kang stressed. "This will be an opportunity to demonstrate to the world our satellite operations capability — the ability to make decisions and take responsibility from start to finish."
This mission control experience is also expected to become a valuable asset for future space data center operations. "Having expanded our control experience from geostationary satellites to the more volatile high-orbit and beyond, we will be able to gradually broaden our business into space data centers, which require advanced satellite service capabilities," Kang said. Space data centers, expected to be commercialized in earnest from the 2030s, are projected to commonly take the form of mounting high-performance computing equipment on satellites.