Growth of the commercial satellite sector

 

Remote-sensing satellites circle the Earth collecting imagery, radio signals and many other types of data. The technology was originally developed by governments for military reconnaissance, weather forecasting and environmental monitoring. But over the past two decades, commercial activity in this area has grown rapidly – particularly in the U.S. The number of commercial Earth observation satellites has increased from 11 in 2006 to more than 500 in 2022, about 350 of which belong to U.S. companies.

 

The earliest commercial satellite remote-sensing companies worked closely with the military from the beginning, but many of the newer entrants were not developed with national security applications in mind. Planet Labs, the U.S.-based company that has played a big role in the Ukrainian conflict, describes its customers as those in “agriculture, government, and commercial mapping,” and it hopes to expand to “insurance, commodities, and finance.” Spire, another U.S. company, was originally focused on monitoring weather and tracking commercial maritime activity. However, when the U.S. government set up pilot programs in 2016 to evaluate the value of data from these companies, many of the companies welcomed this new source of revenue.