The Evolution of Satellite Imagery: From Pixels to Public Goods
The first time I met a satellite image vendor was on a balcony in the Adelaide hills at the Apogee imaging home office. I was a young undergrad starry eyed about selling black and white high resolution images from an Israeli EROS satellite. We often lamented how the research community in Australia never bought our images. He ran a regional distributor business, much like movie rights before streaming.
I went on to work with NASA Ames when the Landsat archive was made public, streaming it to World Wind. Eventually Google Earth arrived and shook up the whole regional distribution and buying scenes business model. Many companies no doubt met their demise. I pivoted from working in satellite imagery to aerial where Google ironically turned out to be one of our main customers and distribution channel. The Netflix to a movie studio. This works until the streaming service decides to start producing its own movies.
Back in satellite land things had moved on dramatically. People had seen the impact on science and other downstream parts of the economy the Landsat program had. They chose to open access in S3 buckets for their imagery as well, especially publicly funded missions. Planet and ICEYE and many other modern satellite operators are moving beyond scenes to services, to solutions–selling answers instead of pixels. Sometimes the answers require more than space based inputs.
Regardless of the commercial scene, progressing research outside of these top companies requires open-access to the data. Talent is globally distributed, opportunity is not. Open data allows field data and more importantly talent from Asia, Africa and South America and often parts of what is very geographically inaccurately referred to as the global south to derive new insights and inform global discourse as our world wakes up to the interconnectedness of itself.
However the big open data providing agencies in US, Europe and Japan are not immune to financial shocks and regime changes. The benefits accrued from the openness of the data rarely flows back to the providing agency’s economy directly. Perhaps a nation state as the backing organization for EO is the wrong model, since benefits are globally diffuse. Perhaps we need something from the UN or an equivalent global space agency to back an EO mission.
While a centralized, well-funded UN space agency capable of launching its own Earth observation missions remains a logistical and financial pipe dream, the landscape is shifting toward issue-specific philanthropy and non-profit models. The Earth Fire Alliance, which recently launched its FireSat constellation to globally track wildfires, proves that not-for-profit models can successfully deploy targeted orbital infrastructure. Similarly, MethaneSAT–developed and funded directly by the Environmental Defense Fund–shows that non-profits can successfully launch dedicated hardware to track specific environmental metrics in the hyperspectral arena. Moving forward, the most viable path for equitable, globally diffuse satellite data may not rely on a monolithic global agency, but rather on decentralized, philanthropically backed consortiums that treat Earth observation as a digital public good rather than a strictly commercial asset.
References and Notes for Further Reading: * EROS Satellite: Low earth orbit (LEO) commercial Earth observation satellites designed by Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI). * Landsat Archive & World Wind: The 2008 public release of the Landsat archive by USGS fundamentally changed the EO landscape. * Cloud Native Geospatial: The transition to hosting data in “S3 buckets” references the democratization of access via formats like Cloud Optimized GeoTIFFs. * Further context: Handwritten notes on EO business models and satellite imagery access.
