## 1 Introduction  
In recent years, we have faced a process of commercialization of space exploration. New actors such as private companies, small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs), and start-ups are increasing their presence in what is called the New Space Economy (NewSpace). NewSpace is seeing enlarging participation of commercial companies in space exploration, with the purpose of developing faster, better and cheaper access to space and spaceflight technologies [1; 2]. In this scope, the government agencies, which were the main agents in the past, now are not uniquely responsible for space missions. Big companies (e.g., SpaceX [3], Blue Origin [4], Virgin Galactic [5]) are investing their funds in researchingand developing new reusable launchers, hence making it increasingly affordable to launch products into space. At the same time, smaller companies are involved in the process, either by deploying and launching small satellites (e.g., CubeSats [6; 7], SmallSats [8]), or by developing new, low-cost solutions dedicated to each part of a space mission (from ground segment to space segment). The effect that NewSpace is having on the field can be summarized as the democratization of space exploration: while the space agencies aim to uniform the space mission paradigm, for example by standardization, private companies address the research and development of innovative, commercial, low-cost systems for the aerospace industry. This process allows, on one side, to lower costs and speed up space mission deployment, and on the other side to promote the presence of even more agents in the sector [1]. In the past years, during the design of a space mission, each space subsystem was usually developed ad-hoc for the mission, with little if any re-use from other missions [9; 10]. With the advent of NewSpace, the spacecraft industry is now evolving towards standardization to promote the re-use of technologies from previous missions [10; 11]. Standardization has become a task of fundamental importance: indeed, the adoption of standard protocols has a large positive impact on the economics of a space mission by improving subsystem devices interoperability and promoting design reuse for subsequent missions. In this scope, the European Space Agency (ESA) is promoting the definition of a set of standards for communication, mainly through the Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems (CCSDS) [12] and the European Cooperation for Space Standardization (ECSS) [13]. Adhering to a standard, though, requires the verification of compliance with the standard itself. Single parts and components shall be tested to abide by the protocol and to intercommunicate correctly. At the same time, newer standards are required to be evaluated and assessed to be accepted and used in future missions. For this reason, Electrical Ground Support Equipments (EGSEs), hence instruments to be used on the ground to test the electronics to be launched, are of fundamental importance in the adoption of a standardized approach, allowing us to (1) validate spacecraft subsystems against the use of specific standards and (2) emulate the use of newer protocols to evaluate their characteristics and performance. A communication standard defined in 2012 by the CCSDS for Telemetry application is the CCSDS 131.2-B. It is a flexible advanced coding and modulation scheme for high-rate telemetry, suitable for science missions and in particular for Earth Observation (EO) missions, where large amounts of data need to be transmitted from satellites to Earth, at high data rates. Being a recently defined protocol, it has currently never been deployed in any space mission. A limiting factor for the use of the CCSDS 131.2-B is represented by the complexity and high cost of the hardware systems required to be compliant with it and to reach the deserved performance. Both transmitters employed on satellites and receivers employed on ground stations are expensive to implement and require significant effort for the complexity of the standard itself.