The View Has Never Been Better. You're Just Not Allowed to See It.

The satellite industry is feels like those coin operated binoculars, but the public cant use them.

Planet recently announced an indefinite holdback on imagery over Iran and the broader Middle East conflict area. It started as a 96-hour delay. Then 14 days. Now it's indefinite, with no stated endpoint or conditions for restoration. Planet isn't Alone, with Vantor (formerly Maxar) and Blacksky likely restricting access in the same way. This isn't a policy adjustment, It's an accelerating enclosure of data access, happening at exactly the moment when the world most needs to understand what's happening on the ground.

And this is entirely in line with the trends, if you’re paying attention. 

Capacity Doesn't Lead to Access

In 1979, journalist and economist William Greider wrote about the prospect of a global satellite imagery system, and his framing is still relevant today:

"The question is not whether global systems will be developed — they will be — but whether nations will compete with one another at extraordinary costs, developing hardware of conflicting design, or whether they will pool their efforts, insuring equitable participation for those poor nations who can't afford their own rockets."

I love this quote, not because our names sound similar, but because it shows how far we have come technologically, but how far we are lagging on making space work for the average person. We chose competition over cooperation.  Nearly five decades later, the result is an industry with extraordinary technical capacity and deeply inequitable access.

Common Space ran a global Demands Assessment with 195 organizations across the humanitarian, human rights, climate, and research communities. 61% identified restrictive licensing as the single biggest barrier to using satellite imagery for humanitarian impact. Not cost. Not resolution. Licensing! the legal and commercial structures that determine who gets to use the data, and under what conditions. The satellites are up there. The imagery exists. The problem isn't technical. It's structural. If you’ve read anything i’ve written before, this wont be a surprise, if you’re new here, welcome to the Status quo.

The Government Has Effectively Taken Over the Commercial Industry

The commercial satellite imagery industry runs on government contracts. Defense and intelligence agencies are the anchor customers for Planet, Vantor (still a dumb name, and i’m really trying to get over it), and BlackSky. These contracts fund the satellites and shape the business model. That's not a criticism, it's just how the industry developed.

But that revenue dependency has consequences. When a government signals it doesn't want certain imagery circulating, companies whose survival depends on that relationship comply. The line between voluntary and involuntary gets very thin when your largest customer is also the entity that regulates you.

This isn't new. In 2001, the US government preemptively bought exclusive access to all Ikonos imagery over Afghanistan, not because they needed it operationally, but to prevent anyone else from having it. More recently, the US cut access to the GEGD contract for Ukraine and partner organizations. Same playbook: control through commercial incentives rather than formal legal orders.Vantor has also just announced their new missions: Pulse and Vantage. Amazing new systems that are coming onboard, but i’m not convinced they change anything. We’ve been told time after time that more capacity online is going to make imagery a commodity, or make access easy, if we just have a little more capacity. Capacity does note improve accessibility, The licensing remains the same, and the systems that limit that access remain the same. Maxar / Vantor successfully launched 6 Legion Satellites, each collecting a potential 700,000 sqkm per day, and we are actually worse off on access than we were before they launched. 

Tasking and Licensing Aren't Built for the Humanitarian World

Humanitarian organizations don't just face access barriers, they face a system that was never designed for them. Tasking priorities are set by the largest paying customers, so government, defense, and intelligence contracts dominate. Humanitarians compete for what's left, at prices calibrated to government budgets they'll never have. In surge situations, exactly when access matters most,  they simply can't afford the data, and rarely get access to the exhaust. USAID cuts and the broader humanitarian funding reset have made this worse, leaving organizations less capable of responding to crises like Iran right now.

Stefaan Verhulst, a leading researcher on data governance, has been warning about exactly this trajectory. Writing in 2024, he described the risk of a "data winter"; a period in which "data assets that could be leveraged for the common good are instead frozen and immobilized." He noted that the current landscape is marked by a trend toward isolation, with "small gardens surrounded by ever higher walls." The satellite imagery industry is a case study in exactly that dynamic.

This is the status quo that is not worth maintaining. It was already broken before access was restricted over Iran, but this is a reminder that capability and capacity does not improve outcomes. 

Iran is an excuse to limit transparency and accountability 

An Industry-Wide Blackout

Planet is getting the attention because they made the restriction public,  but Maxar, BlackSky, and others are almost certainly complying quietly to the same request. What we're watching is a coordinated, industry-wide tightening of who gets to see what, by an administration that has no interest in transparency or accountability. All of it driven by the same underlying dynamic: when your primary customer is the US government, you don't need a formal order to know what's expected of you, they can make a quiet request and have everyone comply.

We also need to be more skeptical of whatever imagery does get released during this period. When access is controlled through selective release, the narrative is controlled too. Satellite imagery carries real evidentiary weight,  it's been used in international courts and human rights investigations because of its perceived neutrality. When that neutrality is compromised by selective release of data, the whole medium loses credibility. What gets shown becomes as meaningful as what gets withheld.

Is this about protecting troops on the ground, or about limiting public visibility into the real-world impacts of military operations, including strikes on civilian infrastructure and universities? That distinction matters enormously for how we evaluate the legitimacy of an indefinite blackout over an entire region. When a president claims that he is going to ‘Destroy a whole civilization’, I think having some checks and balances to that system are warranted. 

The extent of this blackout is also a major concern. It seems to be indefinite… until the end of the war, but we’ve seen these situations before, and its unclear that these restrictions will actually be lifted, because its unclear that there will be an end to this war. This restriction also covers more than just Iran, it includes the entire middle east, including Lebanon, where Israel carried out a massive offensive, while the satellites that were made made to monitor events such as this have been rendered blind through bureaucracy. 

How This Hurts US Commercial Companies

The absurdity is that this posture actively damages the US commercial satellite industry, and sets back US political and commercial interests. Non-US providers aren't bound by these restrictions. Airbus, SatRec Initiative, and other international companies will likely keep serving the markets and partners that US companies are being pulled from. Russian and Chinese government systems are unaffected. The adversaries these holdbacks are meant to disadvantage have their own space programs and their own commercial relationships.

US companies can't publicly say any of this. They can't bite the hand that feeds them. But they're losing credibility and market share with international clients, NGOs, and media organizations while their foreign competitors have an opportunity to fill the gap. The restriction doesn't eliminate the imagery, it just determines who gets to see it and who doesn't. This imagery would historically be difficult to access due to pricing and licensing, but not impossible, but now humanitarians, journalists, human rights advocates, and academics are left in the dark without even the potential to access this imagery. 

It should also be noted that these holdbacks hurt commercial customers that already have agreements in place with the commercial providers. They have signed these agreements with expectations of access when they need it for their work, and now they’ve lost that access.  Oftentimes these agreements will have minimum amounts of data they are contractually obligated to buy to maintain access, and now, they are unable to access that data. This is a perfect example showing how the government interest stands between the commercial success of these companies.

How Common Space Could Shift the Status Quo

Access as a Core Principle

Common Space is building the first community-governed, openly licensed humanitarian satellite, specifically designed to operate outside the incentive structures that produce situations like this.

To be clear: Common Space would operate under a US NOAA commercial remote sensing license, which does include shutter control provisions. We arent claiming otherwise, and we intend to follow all applicable legal frameworks. Shutter control has, to our knowledge, never been formally invoked. What we're seeing now is voluntary compliance driven by commercial incentives, not legal mandates.

That distinction is the key. When your largest customer is the government that regulates you, informal requests carry the force of mandates. Common Space doesn't have that revenue dependency. We're structured as a nonprofit so that we can remain community centered, and mission-focused. The government loses the main lever it uses on commercial providers. That structural independence is what makes genuine access possible, not as an aspiration, but as an operating reality.

I also hope Common Space can force broader conversations: between the commercial industry and government, about process, governance, and the conditions under which data should and shouldn't be withheld. The current system operates on informal pressure and voluntary compliance, with no transparency and no accountability, and this is the status quo which should not be maintained. 

Shifting the power dynamic 

Iran is not an exception, it's a preview to a future we’re actively walking towards if there isn’t an intervention. With increasing conflict, increasing climate disasters, and a broader tightening on open data, transparency and accountability are gradually losing ground to controlled interests. Right now, a handful of companies and governments decide who gets to see what's happening on Earth, and when, and under what conditions. When data is restricted both the governments and the companies win, and the incentives for releasing imagery for the public benefit are further reduced. Events like what is happening in Iran are unfortunate reminders of these restrictions. 

The technology exists. Over a thousand satellites image the Earth every day. What's missing is infrastructure built for the people who need it most, governed by the communities it serves, and independent from the pressures that keep turning the lights off.

In 1979, a Washington Post editorial called for "a global information system, shared and operated cooperatively by all nations" that would "use space satellites and the technological wizardry of modern intelligence agencies for peace-keeping as well as to aid human endeavors, from agriculture to mineral exploration."

47 years later, we have the satellites, technology, community and need,  but we still haven’t gained the independence of access which is required to make this vision a reality. Thats what Common Space is doing, shift the power dynamics of a broken system to one that serves humanity. 

Fighting against the system and the trend

Unfortunately, I don't see this trend slowing down anytime soon, much as I'd like to. Governments will continue pulling levers to push public missions into the private sector, where they retain de facto control over outputs while shedding accountability for them. Landsat is a major test case for how this plays out,  and I believe other missions will follow one of two paths: falling away entirely, leaving permanent gaps in our understanding and measurement of the planet, or being absorbed into the commercial realm, where they'll face the same pressures the current remote sensing community already struggles under, resulting in less data shared publicly over time. This is precisely what's driving the urgency behind Common Space, to demonstrate a better model quickly, and to challenge these dynamics before they become too entrenched to reverse.