This had so many red flags if was basically a May Day parade in Russia.
1. SSG had only been registered in the UK for very-very short time (I want to say weeks) before BUR paid the directors some large sum for a reverse takeover. Nobody in BUR had the technical knowledge to evaluate what they were buying.
2. this was supposed to cover some mysterious IP - that we've never really seen.
3. the 3 directors had control of company from day 1 and large rights vested when they met fairly easy milestones
4. lots of vague announcements showing 1U satellites - lots of hype not much technical detail
5. kept referring to school project (very low bandwidth radio repeater) as being their experience in the nanosat market - also kept referring to one of the directors experience as a fighter pilot. I can see would play well to Israeli domestic audience.
6. narrow band market - rather than broadband - it's almost as though everybody has forgotten how painful 56kbps modems were to use.
7. lack of serious discussion in company announcements around coverage / configuration of constellation to provide 24/7 coverage for point on equator(and now worldwide) - minimum number satellites - spacing etc.
8. lack of announcements of end user terminals - antenna sizes etc
9. MOU with unknown counterparties - beeptoool?
10. Diamonds revenue - no more needs to be said
11. existing broadband competitor that went bankrupt launching their satellites - Iridium -
12. software IP held in Polish company with complicated ownership structure
13. Off the shelf construction requiring months and months of design with nothing to show for it.
14. re-read the virgin announcement - which was obvious fluff by Virgin to try to pump the SAS share price so they could pay Virgin to launch (this was a chicken and egg problem - why build a telemetry system based on satellites which wouldn't be launched when the rockets were being tested. - see the existing competitor)
15. complete lack of visible technical progress since diamonds launch. (nanosat are supposed to be simple low cost - why spend millions doing review after review. whole point is failure is an option - keep it cheap, off the shelf to minimise risk and learn with each generation of sats.)
