Earth observation

node

Commercial remote sensing: optical and radar imagery of the Earth's surface, and the analytics built on it. Its economic peculiarity is that its most consequential datasets are free. The United States opened the entire Landsat archive at no charge in 2008, and the European Union's Copernicus programme has distributed Sentinel data under a free, full and open policy since Sentinel-1A began operations in 2014 — between them supplying a global, calibrated, continuously updated baseline that no commercial operator could profitably duplicate. Commercial value therefore concentrates where public missions do not reach: sub-metre resolution, daily or sub-daily revisit, all-weather synthetic aperture radar, rapid tasking, and the interpretation layer above the pixels. The largest single customer is government, principally defence and intelligence, which distorts the sector's appearance as a commercial market. Measured against satellite communications or navigation, Earth observation data and services remain a small industry — units of billions of dollars a year rather than tens or hundreds — a fact that sits awkwardly beside the sector's prominence in space-economy narratives. Not a place.

A node is not a place. Drawing it on a map would assert something about the world that no stored fact supports.