Let’s talk about New Space and how space data is being used for earth applications. Because while many people think only about rockets when thinking about the space industry, the space sector is much more than this and impacts many around us!
New Space can be considered as a trend of the space sector towards being more innovation and business oriented (Clarke et al., 2021). While at first, the space industry consisted of government agencies, nowadays key players in the space industry also include privately funded companies such as SpaceX, Rocket Lab or Blue Origin. These types of companies have a highly innovative culture and aim to disrupt the space industry by taking risks that are more difficult to take as government agency with tax-payers money. With its disruptive innovation of reusable rockets, SpaceX has already caught the entire launch industry off-guard, making it much more affordable to launch satellites into orbit.
When talking about the space industry, many people only think of upstream space, which includes everything that is focused on (outer)space and sending objects to space. For example, satellites and rockets. However, downstream space is where the greatest growth comes from and where the most opportunities currently are. Downstream space, in short, utilizes the technologies and data from upstream. There are too many examples of how space data (mostly coming from satellites) is being used for real-world earth applications, but I will briefly mention a few that illustrate the importance of space data for earth.
Many governments and companies use satellite data that measures e.g. carbon dioxide and methane levels to locate large emitters. This is being used to in line with the climate action SDG. Furthermore, space data is being used to forecast natural disasters, monitor oceans (plastic) and enable autonomous shipping (ESA, 2022). But there are many more applications, such as visual inspection of large infrastructure projects, (precision) farming, vegetation analyses, detecting and monitoring infections in forests, risk analysis for buildings, archeological research and even in the finance sector to better understand potential risks associated with giving out loans (e.g. for farmers).
Do you believe space data is important and will only become more important in the future? What are some other earth applications based on space data that you can think of?
References:
Clarke, N., Kaufmann, S., Sodtke, C., Weber, C., Moranta, S., Hrozensky, T., de Clercq, A., Alfageme, N. H., Speidel, S., & Spuck, J. (2021). Cosmonautics: the development of space-related technologies in terms of patent activity.
ESA. (2022, April 19). Space technology for life on Earth. The European Space Agency . https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Preparing_for_the_Future/Discovery_and_Preparation/Space_technology_for_life_on_Earth
An interesting blog about the reviving space industry the last years. A good focus on how this revival was triggered and what the lowered cost and commercialization enables New space projects. It was maybe interesting to also focus on the consumer side of this New Space revolution and how consumers could benefit. For example looking at Starlink which is already open to the public en which really can make an impact for consumers.
Hey Ian, very interesting blog post you gave some very interesting examples of how data obtained in space can help us here on earth for example that this obtained data is widely used in for agricultural sector. I definitely believe this type of data will be more important in the future as we can probably gather more types of data and find new use cases for this data. also some rising problems on earth like global warming and pollution will only increase in the upcoming years so these kind of data will be more important than ever in the future.