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The European space industry is booming, yet it struggles to find commercial buyers for its most valuable output: data. At the Living Planet Symposium 2025 in Vienna, both the European Space Agency (ESA) and private sector leaders highlighted Europe’s bold space ambitions and called for increased cooperation to address deep commercial gaps.
Josef Aschbacher, ESA’s director general, emphasized that “Earth observation within the European Space Agency is a major priority.” Recent successful missions include the miniature satellite Φsat-2, which has started transmitting high-definition images back to Earth. These images support disaster management for wildfires, earthquakes, and floods, as well as monitoring ships, illegal fishing, and marine pollution.
However, for European startups looking to develop innovative new services from space, the industry can feel like a siloed bubble. Daniel Smith, Trade and Investment Envoy for Space for the Scottish Government and founder of AstroAgency, warns that there are major fractures between different players in the space sector. There’s a disconnect between launchers, upstream and downstream space companies, and European businesses, preventing them from benefiting from space data.
Smith notes that these companies “still struggle to commercialize” and sell their data to other sectors, partly because the space sector itself doesn’t want to buy the data. This leads to major business gaps: Earth observation companies are going out of business, some more than 10 years old, because they can’t commercialize.
Government organizations like ESA offer grants and incentive programs, but applicants often don’t focus on monetization and commercialization. The result is missed opportunities. Earth observation primarily uses data from low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellites, which have extensive use cases in sectors like agriculture, energy, infrastructure, logistics, maritime, and finance.
Innovative use cases continue to emerge. For instance, Scottish tech company Space Intelligence uses satellite data to create trust in the carbon offset financial market. According to Smith, Earth observation’s potential lies in reframing how we think about space technology: “Space technology is ultimately about Earth, not about space.”
The space industry is typically divided into upstream and downstream sectors. Upstream covers everything from manufacturing to launch, while downstream services offer ready-to-use space data for private companies.
Downstream providers retrieve satellite data, analyze it, and make it accessible for private companies. The LEO data they collect can be immensely valuable, driving the European space industry and advancing development of spaceports, rocket launchers, and satellite companies. However, commercializing this data is challenging.
Many space companies struggle to sell their Earth observation data to other sectors. Smith explains that “the space sector and rocket companies don’t want to buy the data; they want to enable it.”
The reasons European companies do not use space data in their operations are diverse, including a lack of understanding of use cases, stigmas associated with space (slow and expensive processes), and failure to open up and clearly communicate value.
European companies considering Earth observation data for new ventures should focus on downstream services. Spire provides a positive example: it operates a vast constellation network of affordable nano-satellites in LEO, supporting various use cases like greenhouse gas emissions monitoring, IoT system optimization, natural disaster monitoring, maritime analytics, and more.
Spire takes a holistic approach to the space data supply chain, manufacturing and launching over 200 satellites. Smith notes that “they focus very much on constellations for continual coverage” and sell their own satellite data.
Other examples include Catalyst, which signed ESA’s “Statement for a Responsible Space Sector,” and Hydrosat, specializing in water, irrigation, and crop management solutions. Hydrosat’s latest satellite launched in June 2025 to advance thermal satellite data and AI for food production, security, and natural resource management.
Critical infrastructure and resource management are also benefiting from LEO Earth observation data merged with IoT or ground-based sensor information.
European companies don’t need to build their own satellites to benefit from space data. Many providers already operate extensive constellations offering rich, actionable insights. The growth and impact of Earth observation will hinge on stronger push from European companies to harness this wealth of space-derived data. As Smith stated, “We need people to use them.”
