The award is rarely the satellite; it is the ability to operate the fleet. Once you have dozens or hundreds of spacecraft, the binding constraint is no longer launch, it is the operations layer: which satellite talks to which ground station when, what command goes up in the brief window of a pass, and how the schedule degrades gracefully when one node misbehaves.
Spire's grant US10659148B2, classified in H04B 7/18519 and H04B 7/18513 (satellite-communications control and ground systems), claims exactly that backbone. The inventors, Jesse Trutna, Roshan Jobanputra, and Robert Deaton, are describing the command-and-control system that turns a constellation into something a small team can actually fly.
Follow the operational economics. A constellation operator's marginal cost is dominated by ground infrastructure and the labor to run it. A command-and-control system that scales sublinearly with satellite count, where adding the hundredth satellite costs far less to operate than the first, is the difference between a viable fleet and an unmanageable one.
This is the part of the orbital-industrial complex that does not make headlines and decides outcomes anyway. Imaging resolution and broadband speeds get the press; contact scheduling and fleet automation get the margins. The 2020 grant is a marker of which problems a maturing operator had decided were worth defending in patent claims.
The caveat the document cannot resolve is operational reality versus claimed capability. A patent on fleet command does not prove the fleet flew reliably. It does, however, tell you where the operator believed the durable advantage sat: not in any single bird, but in the system that commands them all.