The decisions made in the first three weeks of a programme determine what it costs for the next five years. Most of the expensive problems we are called in to fix were designed in before anyone wrote a line of flight code.
Centimetre accuracy is straightforward with a clear sky and a cooperative environment. We build the positioning systems that hold up when neither is available.
Autonomy that depends on a radio link, a satellite constellation or a ground station is not autonomy. We build vehicles that keep making correct decisions when every external reference is gone.
Most telemetry gives you a filtered summary of a vehicle you cannot reach. We build links that give you the vehicle itself — every subsystem addressable from the ground station as though the bus ran through your desk.
Batteries and termination systems are the two subsystems where a design shortcut is not recoverable in flight. We treat both as safety-critical, because they are.
A system is delivered once and maintained for a decade. Most of the cost, and nearly all of the risk, is in the second part.