Seeing What Matters: Impact Report For a Humanitarian Satellite

Today we're releasing the Common Space Impact Report, and the case it makes is unambiguous: the return on investment from a dedicated humanitarian satellite is extraordinary. It will have an immense impact across many sectors given the depth and breadth of use cases supported with open high-resolution imagery. It will also shift who can do this work, what methods we can use, who we can collaborate with, what gets to scale, how we can promote and share findings. In parallel to democratizing the value of high-resolution data, this mission will spur novel research and applications – questions that couldn’t be explored because the data access didn’t exist. 

What we found

The communities doing the hardest work in the world - responding to disasters, documenting atrocities, feeding displaced populations, tracking disease outbreaks, protecting Indigenous lands - are routinely working without the data they need. Not because the technology or data doesn't exist. It does. But because the systems that control it were built for commercial return and national security priorities, not for the people making life-and-death decisions in the field.

Respondents described open access to high-resolution imagery as the missing structural ingredient - the thing that would finally allow existing tools, skills, and institutions to operate at the speed and scale that today's crises demand. In their words: imagery that arrives days or weeks late isn't just inconvenient. It means roads have flooded, people have moved, evidence has disappeared, and the window for early action has, at which point the data they were looking for becomes obsolete.

A few of the headliner findings: 

1.5 to 2 billion people are within reach. When we mapped where priority humanitarian imagery would be collected against who is affected and who can act on that information, across conflict zones, climate-vulnerable regions, informal settlements, agricultural areas, and disaster-prone coasts, we estimated the reachable population at 1.5 to 2 billion people globally. Even in a conservative, low-adoption scenario, the indirect beneficiary base exceeds 1 billion. That number reflects the incredible work of a network of organizations like HOTOSM, MapAction, WorldPop, GRID3, Microsoft AI4Good, Digital Earth Africa, and many others who transform raw imagery into public goods used by thousands of downstream actors, as well as global and local humanitarian organizations from WFP to NAXA in Nepal and BRiCS in Somalia who directly support the most vulnerable using satellite-derived information. 

The AI equity problem is real, and open data is the fix. A recurring theme in our community survey was geographic bias in machine learning. Today's training data skews heavily toward countries well-covered by commercial imagery. That means AI models perform worst in the places that need them most, including conflict zones, informal settlements, areas across the Global South. Open, high-resolution coverage over these areas would directly address this, enabling locally-relevant models and reducing the concentration of analytical power in well-resourced institutions.

This is about power, not just pixels. Perhaps the most important finding isn't technical. Respondents consistently described the current landscape - fragmented licensing, arbitrary access denials, shutter control - as a governance failure, not just a market gap. Open, community-governed imagery would shift informational power toward the people closest to crisis. Not as passive recipients of outside analysis, but as participants in the decisions that shape their lives.

Even just one satellite, at full capacity, could simultaneously support 15–30 concurrent crisis events from large-scale conflicts and disasters to targeted human rights investigations, while maintaining routine monitoring of cities, agricultural regions, coastal zones, and refugee camps. That is what a dedicated, surge-capable humanitarian mission makes possible. It’s increasingly important to have space assets on our side to tackle the polycrises and support the most vulnerable worldwide. 

Why this matters to our mission

We started Common Space with a belief that the Earth observation sector was at an inflection point and that the question of who benefits from satellite data is ultimately a question about who we think deserves to be seen. This report is the evidence base for that belief.

It tells us the demand is real and urgent. It tells us the ecosystem is ready to translate open data into action at scale. And it tells us that the risks, while real and worth naming honestly, are manageable if governance is built in from the start, not bolted on at the end.

That governance work is already underway. Our task force is tackling the hard questions: how data is accessed, how tasking decisions are made, how vulnerable populations are protected, and how the mission stays accountable to community needs over time. 

The next phase is about making this real: advancing our governance framework, securing partnerships across the satellite value chain, and mobilizing the catalytic funding to design, build, and launch. We're ready. And we're not doing it alone.

Read the full Impact Report →

To every person who filled out our community demand survey, who reviewed sections of this report, who sent us letters of support, who pushed back on our assumptions, who shared this project with a colleague, thank you! You are the reason this report says "community-driven" and means it.