Question: How many people does it take to manage and run a satellite?

Christopher Youens answered on 5 Mar 2019:

When we first launch the satellite we have whole teams of engineers in the operations centre ready to support. These engineers cover all the aspects of the spacecraft, like power, thermal, control, communications, software, and they can offer insight in any problems or odd behaviours.

I can’t speak for the big missions like ESA and NASA where large teams take care of missions, at SSTL we do ‘lights out’ operations where we get notified if a spacecraft has a problem.

For us, once we are in our normal mission phase it’s usually a single engineer that takes care of the health of a satellite. But, we have service delivery managers to talk to the customer, and specialist engineers are usually available and helpful during tricky situations!