The 2024 Commercial Remote Sensing Global Rankings are out and it shows China has made more gains and leads in several areas, though the U.S. will soon be strengthening its position. As for Canada, it’s in the picture, but much further back.
The authors of the rankings include the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) Aerospace Security Project, Taylor Geospatial Institute, Taylor Geospatial Engine, and the United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation.
The authors called this years report a “Gold Rush” and handed out “medals” in 11 categories. Canada won a bronze medal, but more on that later.
For the medal count, China came in first with 14 medals, the U.S. was second with 12, and although Finland and Uruguay had two medals each, Finland rounds out the top three having one a Gold and Bronze versus two Silvers for Uruguay.
Astute readers will notice the cover art does not match the results. It’s something I wondered about so I reached out to one of the authors, David Gauthier of GXO, Inc. David told SpaceQ that “the cover art was inspired by the traditional EO imaging category and the aspiration that the US would regain the lead (via WorldView Legion). Using the French flag was also a cheeky nod to the recent Paris Olympics.”
Rankings introduction
In their introduction the authors the last report of this kind was put together in 2021 by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA). The authors of that report “sought to understand trends in the global remote sensing marketplace. In 2021, it produced a ranking of commercial remote sensing systems across various categories of performance: a ‘satellite Olympics’ that coincided with the 2021 Summer Olympics.”
The authors took that theme and used it for this years rankings.
They added, “The NGA product was informative and well received by the government, industry, and academia. It challenged assumptions by policymakers, many of whom ‘assumed that U.S. companies would be industry leaders across the board.’ Yet, U.S. systems won ‘gold’ in only three of the nine categories. The 2021 product spurred important conversations about the importance of U.S. leadership in commercial remote sensing and, according to some U.S. companies, prompted new investments to accelerate developments in certain areas of remote sensing where the United States appeared to lag the rest of the world in technology.”
Overall rankings observations
For the rankings this year the authors put forward this observation. “This year’s assessment centers largely on advances in U.S. and Chinese remote sensing systems. Of the eleven performance categories, Chinese systems garnered the gold medal in five and U.S. systems in four, with Finland and South Korea each securing a gold medal. Nearly half of the podium spots went to satellite systems launched between 2021 and 2024, showing a large amount of movement within the last four years and more advanced capabilities being introduced in the global commercial marketplace.”
Canada’s bronze medal
With respect to how Canada did, the authors gave a bronze medal to MDA Space for the RADARSAT-2 satellite. They also mentioned MDA’s CHORUS-C, favourably.
“While Chinese firms have made less progress in X-band SAR, they lead the pack in C-band SAR. C-band SAR provides lower-resolution radar imagery over larger areas and is particularly useful for environmental analysis, including global mapping, landform changes, and ocean monitoring. The aging Canadian RADARSAT-2 satellite earned a bronze medal and its follow-on system, the CHORUS-C satellite from MDA Space, is expected to compete favorably in future rankings.”
They also added, “It is worth noting that all commercial SAR companies will approach a resolution limit based on spectrum constraints set by the International Telecommunication Union. With resolution and dwell time approaching technical limits, where commercial SAR companies go next in offering differentiated performance and products over their competitors will soon make these comparisons more complicated and diverse.”
Not mentioned was Wyvern, though that could be expected as they are still in the early stages of their hyperspectral offering.