There's a particular kind of engineering hubris that shows up in early-stage space and Earth observation projects. It usually sounds like this: "We'll handle scale when we get there."
You won't. Or rather, by the time you get there, it'll already be on fire.
Space data isn't just "high volume." It's high volume with hard temporal constraints, narrow delivery windows, and operational consequences that have nothing to do with whether a dashboard loads slowly. A satellite downlink window might give you six minutes. Miss the processing window for a wildfire detection feed and the output is no longer early warning — it's a post-mortem input. Latency here isn't a UX metric. It's a mission metric.
So let's talk about how to actually build these pipelines in a way that survives contact with reality.
Decouple Your Transport Layer First
