OTTAWA – The Earth observation satellite services market is about to boom, but more needs to be done to help Canadian companies get a share of this prosperity. That was the takeaway from the Space Bound 2022 conference session, “Industry Perspectives On The Critical Role And Growing Market For Earth Observation.” The conference was hosted by Space Canada October17-19, 2022 at Ottawa’s Bayview Yards.
The prosperity that is about to sweep the Earth observation satellite industry is similar to the booms already experienced by satellite communications (SATCOM) and satellite-based navigation, said Wade Larson, SVP of Business Development at EarthDaily Analytics. “Both of those industries went through a dramatic increase in their economic and technological reach when they became embedded utilities in much larger agencies,” he explained. “What’s going to happen with Earth observation is that satellite data en masse is going to be merged with cloud computing scale and artificial intelligence … (Demand for services based on this processed data) is going to pop because the planet’s needs — from secure food to deforestation, to disaster management, to real time monitoring of wildfires — are immense.”
Larson’s view was endorsed by Minda Suchan, MDA’s VP of GeoIntelligence. “There is so much opportunity,” she said, driven by Earth observation enhancements such as “innovation and additional space capabilities.”
Ironically, the very usefulness of Earth observation satellite data for farmers, weather forecasters, and the general public has led to a call for this information to be provided freely as a ‘public good.’ The logic of this argument was acknowledged and then qualified by Stéphane Germain, President of GHGSat. “It absolutely should be a public good: The data should be available to everybody for free,” he declared. “[But] Here’s the catch: We wouldn’t exist if that was the model.”
The sad truth is that someone has to pay to provide Earth observation satellite data for free. A second truth: “The Canadian Space Agency only has so much money,” Germain said. “NASA only has so much money. The European Space Agency only has so much money … So there has to be a way that a commercial model can coexist with government models.”
Stéphane Germain’s solution to this problem is for governments to sign on as “anchor clients” for Earth observation services such as GHGSat (which monitors global greenhouse gas emissions from space), providing the funding to finance this public good. “It absolutely makes sense for the government to buy data and make it available for free to the scientific community and to other businesses that want to develop downstream applications,” he said. “That’s what the European Space Agency is doing. And we in Canada should be doing the same thing.”
“We’re quite unified in our view as to the importance of having the government support this leading edge technology,” agreed Mark Wlodyka, VP of Canadian Government Programs with SpaceAlpha, a provider of ultra high resolution Earth imaging. “When you try to go and sell to the export market commercially, that’s the question that’s asked: ‘Why doesn’t Canada buy your data?’” he said. Unfortunately, if you’re a Canadian Earth observation services provider, “you don’t have the answer for that, which is different than the Europeans and Americans.”