Earth observation satellite programs are currently facing, for some applications, the need to deliver hourly revisit times, subkilometric spatial resolutions, and near-real-time data access times. These stringent requirements, combined with the consolidation of small-satellite platforms and novel distributed architecture approaches, are stressing the need to study the design of new, heterogeneous, and heavily networked satellite systems that can potentially replace or complement traditional space assets. In this context, this paper presents partial results from ONION, a research project devoted to studying distributed satellite systems and their architecting characteristics. A design-oriented framework that allows selecting optimal architectures for the given user needs is presented in this paper. The framework has been used in the study of a strategic use-case and its results are hereby presented. From an initial design space of 5586 potential architectures, the framework has been able to preselect 28 candidate designs by an exhaustive analysis of their performance and by quantifying their quality attributes. This very exploration of architectures and the characteristics of the solution space are presented in this paper along with the selected solution and the results of a detailed performance analysis.