Locating Space Data
You don’t need me to tell you that the number of earth observation satellites in operation and planned is heading ever upwards or of the consequent explosion in high resolution (spatial, spectral and temporal) data. Much is rightly made of the opportunity that such data flows represents to the monitoring of the planet for good. The “trouble” with this is that most of these sensors are commercial with backers who expect to get a return on their investment, and quickly. Not to say that measuring and reporting say deforestation or oil spills can’t serve both public and private need but focusing on the former is to risk long term the very real value of the long term sustainability that can only be guaranteed by the latter.
In many ways in the public eye satellite data is already somehow mainstream. We see RADAR images in weather forecasts and we see sensitive sites and post-event details in Haiti and Indonesia in the news thanks to commercial companies, to the extent that it’s almost humdrum. As any space nerd will tell you, them’s just pictures (actually the pedants would say “images”) and the real juice is to be found by other means, usually wrapped in impenetrable to most jargon. Ay, there’s the rub.
Or indeed the irony. For in those pictures lie the compelling stories that can power the insights as a service sustainable business model opportunity hidden in the real juice. We may want and need satellite data to be mainstreamed but the urgent truth is that the end users and beneficiaries no more care whether their paid for insights come from satellites as fly to the moon.
These customers tend to value timeliness, continuity, reliability, consistency, accuracy and (possibly) transparency in the services they receive; and they will continue to pay for those services if there is a cost benefit from one or more of those characteristics from doing so.
The myriad of new satellites and sensors is a veritable maze of acronyms, hard for even the initiated to navigate, made harder by widespread challenges associated with the perceived to find, accessibility and use the data “yourself”. It just isn’t plausible for time-stressed benches of professionals in their chosen disciplines to avail of “the data” (and there is so much of it), just as they wouldn’t go to the MNOs for raw telephone data.
The difference is that MNOs have never tried that approach, relying on the stories that downstream companies ingesting their data tell themselves and their customers.
Without the widespread integration and sharing of space derived location insight into daily workflows, decision making and processes the emerging XaaS satellite data business model will stall, shirts will be lost and global public good wither.
You need a hand to understand and navigate the array of options that can help you appreciate the opportunity having a space derived information and insights string to your bow affords? Or to digest the art of the possible buried in the applications and use cases in the wild in the context of your own or your customer’s challenges?