Earth Observation

Between 2021 and 2022, five Earth Observation companies went public promising commercial customers. Combined projections exceeded $5.7 billion by 2025. Actual revenue came in under $680 million. Most of it came from the military.

The EU spent nearly €10 billion on Copernicus and over €300 million on Destination Earth. Six regulations now require satellite data for compliance. None of them references a common standard. The observation system does not produce one.

A satellite images a farmer's soil every six days with precision no ground sensor matches. She has never seen the data. No app delivers it. The satellite might as well not exist. 150 years of weather history explains why.

Every institution was designed for a planet that no longer exists. AI in Earth observation is the most sophisticated epicycle ever built — transforming how we see the planet while delivering that seeing into frameworks that can only absorb information confirming the world they were designed for.

A fifteen-year story of how a climate tech company became a defence contractor — not through one dramatic decision, but through a thousand small rational ones. No single decision was wrong. That's the whole point.

Science rewards complexity. Commercial markets reward clarity. The gap between what we're trained to build and what buyers actually need explains why brilliant Earth observation companies keep defaulting to defence.

We have more eyes on Earth than ever. Thousands of satellites capture terabytes daily. But we keep fitting transformative data into frameworks built for a planet that no longer exists.