Describe how Azure Orbital Ground Station fits into the space market

  • 4 minutes

Azure Orbital Ground Station helps enterprises and operators address key market challenges to make earth observation data available to new markets, including commercial markets that traditionally haven’t had access to space data.

In this unit, you’ll learn to describe how the space industry is changing, as well as common challenges to accessing space data.

Market context

The space industry is experiencing rapid growth accompanied by major changes:

  • More and more satellites are launched into space: Satellites are becoming much smaller in size and the cost to launch them is decreasing. These combined changes have resulted in an increasing number of satellites in space—up 179% from 2016 to 2021.
  • Sensors are generating more data: Thanks to advancements, satellite sensors can generate increasing amounts of data. For example, a single NASA Earth Science mission can generate seven times more data than previously collected over the program’s lifetime. While these advancements are exciting, they require more processing and storage to handle.
  • Space is shifting to commercial opportunities: Space data was traditionally reserved for government applications. However, as technology advances, there are more opportunities for commercial applications of earth observation data. The space economy reflects these changes and is growing at a rapid pace. Experts estimate that the space industry will grow to $600B by 2030.

While strong advancements are being made, common challenges remain.

Common challenges

Let’s look at a hypothetical satellite operator company called Contoso. Contoso is building and launching imaging satellites to detect, monitor, and predict global phenomena such as wildfires, crop health, natural disasters, and supply-chain monitoring. To use the data collected from their satellites, Contoso needs ground stations on earth that can receive the data.

There are several challenges that Contoso encounters when trying to downlink observation data from their satellites to ground stations:

  • The high cost of building ground station infrastructure
  • Access to ground stations can be limited by geographic footprint
  • Negotiating with individual ground stations for communication slots is time consuming
  • Building ground station infrastructure requires a long-term commitment and high capital expenditures (CAPEX)

These challenges present a high barrier to entry for Contoso.