Commercial remote sensing

Abstract

The commercial market today is served by both aerial and spaceborne sectors, with some overlap. Over the last decade, the relative roles of each sector have become more clearly defined within the market. The aerial sector continues to be dominated by smaller companies and governmental entities, with significant national and even regional variability. The spaceborne sector is moving rapidly from an early exploratory phase, in which new technologies, business models, and regulatory environments were being assessed, to a mature phase with well-established success paths. The entire space industry is becoming more commercialized, from launch vehicles to spaceports, establishing a positive context within which remote sensing’s own commercialization takes place. The remote sensing industry as a whole is moving from a platform-centric view to a services-centric view in which the features of the data are more important than the features of the sensors. Governments are becoming more focused on remote sensing as an important element of their space programs. They are migrating to smaller but more capable satellites, and they view commercialization or dual use as an important element of their efforts. Capabilities of commercial systems are increasingly diverse, from the growing use of radar to the selection of optical bands to the availability of short-revisit imagery. All trends suggest that the importance of commercial remote sensing will continue to grow in the coming years.