The goal of our work is to lower financial and engineering barriers that hinder access to science data and telemetry generated by satellites and other space systems. We are developing ground infrastructure to increase network access to space-borne assets. We are making this infrastructure robust and reliable while being built from lower cost, commodity components. Our vision for this network infrastructure is a loose federation of ground stations that provides global, cross-mission support. This federated ground station network (FGN) will harness the strengths and diversity in global ground stations that are under different administrative domains to increase network connectivity to satellites and to enhance basic ground station capabilities. We are developing infrastructure for the virtualization of ground stations. The decomposition of ground stations into core components enables dynamic composition of virtual ground stations across multiple independent installations. We are developing recovery-oriented computing techniques to build highly available systems from less reliable commodity components. These techniques assume failures are inevitable and focus on rapid failure detection and recovery. We are also developing autonomous, network-centric ground station installations. Capabilities of these installations include: performing automated satellite passes; stitching satellite data products from multiple installation sources; interfacing with human and software agent control; running local missionspecific software; and coordinating with other installations to optimize communication opportunities. This paper provides an overview of related research and describes our concept of operations for an FGN.