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Every business can see from space now

Businesses are using Earth observation data to monitor supply chains, assess disasters, track crops and gain real-time competitive insights

Satellite image (c) 2026 Vantor / Getty Images

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For years, the smartest traders on Wall Street had a quiet edge. They paid research firms to count cars in Walmart $WMT -0.39% parking lots from space, tracking foot traffic before quarterly earnings came out. They watched shadows inside oil storage tanks to estimate crude inventories before official announcements. A satellite photo, decoded into a trading signal, sold to whoever could afford the subscription.

That kind of intelligence used to be exclusive, and rarely deployed. High resolution imagery was expensive to capture and even more expensive to interpret. A hedge fund might pay tens of thousands of dollars a month for access, plus the salary of an analyst who knew how to read it.

Now the imagery itself is becoming far more available, the constellations........

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