The Story of Atlas Space Operations: Building the Internet Layer for Space Communication

The Story of Atlas Space Operations: Building the Internet Layer for Space Communication

The decision to bet everything on space infrastructure happened in a pub in Birmingham, UK. Brad Bode and his small team had been trying to build software for trading power through renewable energy assets. The runway was dwindling. The model wasn’t working for a startup team. They needed to pivot or die.

They chose pivot.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Brad Bode, Founder CTO & CIO of Atlas Space Operations, a ground software as a service platform that’s raised over $37 million, shared the story of how that pub conversation led to pioneering an entirely new category in space infrastructure.

The Frustration That Sparks Everything

Every founding story starts with frustration. For Brad, it built over 12 years at TRW and Northrop Grumman, two aerospace giants where he worked on bleeding-edge R&D. “I was constantly on the bleeding edge of technology, trying to take that technology and transition it to actual programs of record in the government,” Brad recalls. “And that was a lot of fun. So I got to experiment, but I also got to see software get used in the real world.”

But by 2012, the frustration outweighed the fun. Amazon Web Services was transforming software development. The cloud was reshaping entire industries. And the government was still deploying technology that felt decades old. “At some point I became frustrated with the pace at which they were adopting technology, how they would be using very old technology,” Brad explains.

He almost joined the FBI. Got invited to a class. Turned it down primarily because of money. Then a friend recruited him to build software monitoring slopes in copper mines, gold mines, and oil pipelines. They landed a Department of Energy contract monitoring US oil reserves. Brad didn’t own any of the business. “And I said, well, I’d really like to know what it’s like to own a business or to start one myself,” he recalls.

The Opportunity Hiding in Plain Sight

A former Northrop Grumman colleague, Sean McDaniel—a serial entrepreneur—approached Brad about starting a satellite communication services business. The timing aligned perfectly. Brad had the aerospace background. Sean understood government contracts. And Brad knew the industry was ripe for disruption.

The problem was obvious to anyone who’d worked inside government aerospace programs. If you owned a satellite, you leased time on foreign-owned antenna infrastructure. You shipped stacks of hardware to locations across the globe. You managed all the VPN connections, tunnels, and IP routing yourself. “Everything was bespoke. They would put up a new antenna for a satellite program. They would take a stack of hardware and ship it to each location, plug it in, and then you’d have to manage all the VPN connections, the tunnels, the IP routing,” Brad explains.

By 2014 and 2015, the cloud was ready. “The cloud was clearly on its way and doing very well,” Brad notes. The opportunity was clear: make all of that infrastructure access happen through the cloud.

Two Years of Building Before Revenue

What followed was a masterclass in bootstrap patience. Brad started coding proof of concepts without pay. “I started coding proof of concepts. You know, weren’t getting paid or anything. It was very much a bootstrapped business,” he says.

The strategy relied on complementary skills. While Brad coded, Sean hunted for government contracts that would let them buy antennas for agencies and install them somewhere. They assembled a small team: retired Air Force personnel who understood RF communication and antenna systems, plus a few software developer friends Brad brought in for specific work. Everyone eventually got paid. Except Brad. “I never got paid,” he notes about those first two years.

To survive, Brad took consulting work through 10x management, fixing broken software projects for other companies. It wasn’t glamorous, but it funded the build. “You learn a lot by doing that,” Brad observes.

The breakthrough came roughly two years in. They won a NOAA contract to install antennas in Ghana, Western Africa. NOAA needed constant satellite data for weather prediction models. “And once we won that, you know, it was really off to the races because now we had to prove that the software worked, which we did, and we had to refine it and we had to make it better,” Brad says.

The government contract provided more than revenue. It provided legitimacy. “The government putting their weight behind something is usually a very good thing, and it’s a good sign,” Brad explains.

Betting on Growth That Hadn’t Arrived

Here’s what made Atlas Space’s early years particularly risky: they were building for a market that didn’t fully exist yet. “It’s important to note that there’s not a lot of satellites, particularly at that time, there wasn’t a lot of satellites that needed this service per se,” Brad admits. “We were banking on the fact that the growth of the satellite industry would come, and it did.”

Everyone agreed space would grow. SpaceX was generating attention. Venture capital firms were starting to build space portfolios in 2016 and 2017. But the pace was uncertain, and most investors focused on the satellites themselves rather than ground infrastructure.

Brad found this puzzling. “The satellites are about data, you know, collection, right? They collect some kind of data, they have to get it back to Earth and then they have to process it. So, you know, there’s a lot of value in data, but everything had to get back to Earth,” he explains. “And everyone had used the same method, which was antennas, that they used RF communication to send it back to Earth.”

Their earliest investor, Casey Cowell—who founded US Robotics and sold it for billions—saw the opportunity in owning the data pipeline from space. The bet eventually paid off. SpaceX made launching satellites dramatically cheaper. Hardware costs dropped. “The success of SpaceX in launching satellites, just launching and making it inexpensive to launch satellites, is a major factor in a lot of these startups being able to even succeed,” Brad notes.

Creating Language for Something Nameless

When Atlas Space started in 2015, there wasn’t even a term for what they were doing. Around 2017, “ground station as a service” emerged as industry vocabulary. But Brad felt it undersold their actual offering.

“We looked at it and said, we’re really not just a station that implied infrastructure as a service. And we know there’s a difference between infrastructure as a service and software as a service,” Brad explains. They weren’t just providing infrastructure access. They were coordinating equipment, integrating everything into the cloud, and layering software that made the system more reliable and secure.

The solution: ground software as a service. “We’re really SaaS provider, but what are we providing? Ground software,” Brad says. “So ground usually refers to the stuff on earth that helps you talk to your satellite. Thus ground S, a, a s ground software as a service.”

The Future: Building Space’s Routing Layer

Today, Atlas Space sits at an inflection point. They’ve split their business into two sections. Their network services provide ground software as a service to commercial satellite operators and some government programs. Their subsidiary, Freedom Space Technologies—100% US owned with all US employees—serves exclusively the US government, enabling work in secure areas.

The government side is growing faster. Brad anticipates Freedom Space Technologies will represent 80% of the company within six months. But the real vision extends beyond current revenue splits.

Brad sees the next five years transforming space communication fundamentally. Right now, almost all satellite communication uses radio frequencies. But RF has bandwidth limits, and data volumes are exploding. “However, the data volume is increasing and there’s an upper limit to how much data you can move over those frequencies,” Brad explains. “There’s also a latency issue.”

Three new communication methods are emerging: space relays that route data between satellites before reaching Earth, optical communications using laser pulses like fiber optics from space, and leveraging existing constellations like Starlink. “You want to put all of that behind one single piece of software that allows you to access space anytime, anywhere. That’s our slogan,” Brad says.

The vision is building space’s routing layer. “You should not be as concerned about where on the Earth the data is getting. You should be more concerned about the amount of data and the timeliness in which you get that data,” Brad explains. Just like the Internet abstracts away how packets reach you, space communication should abstract away whether data comes through RF, optical, or relay.

“In the next five years, we’re really going to see that shape up,” Brad predicts. The government is funding development. SpaceX is building relay capabilities. Startups are launching new constellations that need better infrastructure. “And we hope to be the ones providing that aggregation of that access,” Brad says.

From that pub in Birmingham to pioneering a category to building space’s Internet layer, Atlas Space’s story is about betting early on infrastructure that enables everything else. The satellites get the headlines. But someone needs to own the data pipeline. Brad decided it should be them.