How Space Aye is Supporting Exponential Growth in Earth Observation
- Crawford Tait
- Apr 14
- 4 min read
At Space Aye, we often talk about a not-too-distant future when Earth Observation (EO) satellites will be cheaper and easier to deploy, and there will be exponentially more than in orbit now. This would radically increase the availability of imagery and disrupt current business models.
But what will that look like in practice? How will it actually work?
The Present Day
Right now, satellite constellation operators also maintain infrastructure on earth – ground stations. How does it work? Images are captured, compressed and stored on the satellite until it’s in range of a ground station and can transmit the data to earth. Satellite orbits and the location of ground stations dictate when this can happen – typically, a satellite may be in range of a ground station for only 10% of its orbit (around 10 mins).
Typical on-board storage: around 250GB
EO satellites have traditionally used radio frequencies to transmit data to earth; however, this frequency band is controlled and licensed, congested, and has inherent limits on the transmission speeds that can be achieved. In 2025 a consortium of EO companies came together to oppose a proposal to start opening up spectrum relied on for satellite downlinks to operators of mobile 5G services, illustrating the competing demands on what is a limited resource.
Typical RF downlink speed: around 500 Mbps, current max around 1Gbps
Once data is transmitted to earth, it is subject to further processing, for example:
Correction for atmospheric effects and distortions in geometry.
Image enhancement.
Combining data in different spectra to produce more useful images.
Growth in EO satellite numbers
There are currently around 1200-1500 EO satellites in orbit. This number has increased exponentially since around 2015 and is expected to rise to around 5,500 by 2033 (source).
This growth is driven by the availability of smaller satellites that are cheaper to build and launch, and reflects increasing demand for EO data across a wide range of sectors and applications. The promise is that these applications could be turbo-charged with more frequent passes, extended global coverage, and increased capacity.
But, given the requirement to transmit all this data to earth, and the potential bottleneck of radio frequency communications, what emerging technologies will support this growth to ensure near real-time availability of high quality EO data?
The Future of Earth Observation
Downlink speed and capacity
Systems that use lasers for communication are already in production and can be expected to replace traditional radio frequency downlinks. These increase downlink capacity by a factor of 100 to 1000, meaning that much higher volumes of data can be transmitted with lower latency. (for example: AAC Clyde Space, Astrolight).
Laser communications for EO data have been successfully demonstrated by NASA, and implemented in the Space Data Highway project, a collaboration between the European Space Agency and Airbus.
Ground station availability
Where will all this data go? Mirroring what happened to support the explosion in internet capacity on earth, cloud service providers like Amazon and Microsoft now provide Ground Station as a Service (GSaaS) offerings. This means that even small satellite operators can access a global network of ground stations on a pay-as-you-go basis, without huge investment in infrastructure.
Larger networks also reduce latency (the time between capture and delivery of data), since a satellite is likely to be in-range of a ground station much sooner after data capture occurs.
Orbital processing and networking
SpaceX already uses laser-based networking for its Starlink system and has recently applied to launch up to a million new satellites, to function as orbital data centres. Whilst the sector is in its infancy, there are a number of start-ups and established players pursuing satellite-based data processing and storage.
The computational demands of AI are fueling this interest, with the promise of data centres in space that could tap into unlimited solar power, whilst taking advantage of radiative cooling, and communicating via high speed, low latency laser-based networking.
What would this mean for Earth Observation? The availability of processing power in space would facilitate the analysis and processing of data before transmission to earth. For some AI-powered applications, it would mean that models could be trained and hosted in space – processing new imagery and delivering only the insights of analysis to earth, without the need for raw data to be downloaded at all.
It would also mean that “tip and cue” type applications (where analysis of low-resolution imagery or other data indicates that a high-resolution image should be captured) could run autonomously in space, with only the most relevant data ultimately downloaded to earth.
Finally, when combined with space-earth networks like Starlink, IoT data from earth could be seamlessly input to models running in orbit, that could decide when imagery should be captured based on analysis of data from earth.
A new business model for EO
The advances described above, along with the proliferation of EO satellites, will lead to a commoditisation of EO data. We can imagine that smaller players running their own constellations of compact satellites using GSaaS networks, will be actively seeking ways to both exploit the data they collect, and sell any redundant capacity.
Platforms like Space Aye’s Large Terrestrial Exchange (LTx) will be perfectly positioned to serve this market by offering a combination of
Simplified consumer access to multi-provider imagery and tasking,
A marketplace for providers of EO data and
Licensable intellectual property allowing the merger of IoT data and satellite imagery.
Conclusion
The exponential growth in earth observation satellites, combined with new technologies for networking and data processing, will lead to easier access to near real-time EO data. This in turn will drive new applications powered by platforms like Space Aye’s LTx that simplify and democratise access to multi-provider imagery.
