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> Plus, the standard way of getting a ground station outside a country's land footprint is to put one on a ship.

Never heard of a ship based ground station, and that's saying something as I'm in the industry. How does that work? I'd imagine the antenna would need to be on a massive gimbal, yeah?

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From the top of my head there is Soviet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosmonavt_Yuriy_Gagarin

In principle this isn't that different from ships designed to track ICBMs, and I've seen designs both with spinning parabolic radar antennas in radomes and regular antennas on gimbals. In fact many of those tracking ships were used in space programmes, but I'm not certain, whether just for one way telemetry or two-way comms

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