Bracing For The Satellite Pixel Glut of 2023 : MapBrief™

With Serious Money flooding the Earth Observation sector–Billionaire money, Former Treasury Secretary/ Wall Street money, etc.–the industry is SPAC’d up and hurling satellites and sensors (optical, radar, hyperspectral, you name it) into orbit at a dizzying rate.

But what if the engineering virtuosity required to successfully launch a satellite and successfully collect sensor data is not the most difficult problem to be solved? What if finding product-market fit for the resolution/sensor-type/temporal-cadence of your pixels is the greater challenge? What if with every successful launch and funding round it’s becoming a little more obvious that Earth Observation’s challenge isn’t Supply, it’s Demand?

Because while the Customer of First Resort–Big Government (specifically the defense and intel sectors)–is happy to do its part and even nurture new entrants by spreading its bets, it can’t support everyone’s heady revenue projections based on the premium incumbent pricing of the past. Recent entrants speak optimistically about segments such as Agriculture, Insurance, et cetera and imply an impressively diversified revenue base. To those of us who have watched the big incumbents (Maxar and Airbus) try and grow a variety of verticals over the past two decades with modest results, projections of ravenous commercial growth over, say, the next five years seem a little too frothy.

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