Satellite communications

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The oldest commercial use of space and, for six decades, the largest source of genuinely commercial space revenue. Its historic core was one-way video distribution: direct-to-home television, and the delivery of programming to cable headends, both of which suited geostationary satellites well because the customer equipment never has to track anything. That core has been in structural decline for more than a decade as streaming displaced satellite television, and the operators built around it — the traditional geostationary fleet operators — have seen revenue fall while their replacement capital costs did not. The growth has moved to connectivity rather than broadcast: consumer broadband from low Earth orbit, maritime and aviation connectivity, government and military communications, and backhaul for terrestrial networks in places where fibre does not reach. Read against the industry's own segment accounting, satellite services plus the ground equipment that receives them account for the large majority of satellite industry revenue, with manufacturing and launch together forming a small single-digit-percentage remainder. 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.