In a village in rural India, a farmer checks his phone for an alert that could save his family from a flood. Thousands of kilometers away, in Barcelona, a team of engineers monitors a network of satellites, ensuring a remote town in Bolivia has the power it needs to run its hospital.
This is the new space race: it’s not about billionaires or Mars colonies. The real breakthroughs happening in orbit are focused on saving Earth, not leaving it.
When most people think of space, images of rockets, distant planets, and billionaires racing to colonize Mars come to mind. Popular companies like SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Virgin Galactic dominate this narrative, capturing public attention with exploration missions and even celebrity space trips. But beyond the headlines, a quieter transformation is underway. The rapidly growing “Space-for-Earth” is looking to tackle humanity’s most urgent challenges including climate change, food insecurity, health access, energy and national defense.
Technological advancements and lower costs have unleashed a new wave of innovation. Smaller, cheaper satellites in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) are enabling high-bandwidth communications and real-time monitoring that would have been impossible a few years ago.
What was once the exclusive domain of government agencies is now a growing entrepreneurial hub. In fact, investors poured $26 billion USD into space startups in 2024, and experts predict the space economy could hit $800 billion USD by 2027.
Here’s how it’s already paying off across diverse sectors:
Monitoring and Mitigating Climate Risk
Satellites are providing valuable data to better understand the changes in rising sea levels and ocean temperatures, as well as forecasting extreme weather events, tracking CO2 emissions, and detecting deforestation. In fact, these satellites supply more than half of the essential climate variables used by scientists globally.
Companies like Gramener are layering AI onto this data, combining satellite imagery with infrastructure and demographic information to make cities more resilient.
In India, Gramener partnered with SEEDS and Microsoft to create an AI cyclone preparation model called Sunny Lives, which uses satellite imagery to classify rooftops as an indicator of how well a house can withstand storms and flooding. Using this data, together with information about waterways and topography, the model assigns risk scores to homes, allowing authorities to prioritize evacuations and disaster-response efforts.
This model was deployed at scale in 2021 during Cyclone Yaas in the eastern coastal city of Puri. SEEDS volunteers were able to alert vulnerable families two days prior to the disaster, helping over 1,100 families safeguard their property and evacuate on time. These systems can also be adapted for other calamities like heat waves to earthquakes.
Studying Disease and Drug Development
Most of us on Earth rarely think about forces like gravity, but for scientists who are working to solve the mysteries of disease, its effects and the forces of containers on scientific samples can alter experimental results and affect breakthrough discoveries.
Space offers a unique laboratory environment that allows researchers to study proteins, cells, and diseases in ways impossible on Earth.
For one, Helogen is taking this concept further with orbital labs, where cancer cells and proteins are studied in microgravity. Such a unique environment allows researchers to build 3D models that more closely replicate human biology, thus accelerating oncology drug development. Varda Space Industries has similarly crystallized pharmaceuticals in orbit, including ritonavir, an HIV medication, which improves these drugs’ stability.
The potential for space applications in healthcare is vast, especially as established aerospace companies partner with businesses in other sectors. A partnership between digital commerce firm Nisum and advanced research company DeepSpace Biology, for instance, is leveraging this combined expertise to unlock new possibilities in medical research, precision medicine, and biotech to shape the future of healthcare.
Improving Agriculture and Food Security
With over 730 million people facing food insecurity around the world, agriculture must become smarter and more precise. Space-based sensors and satellites are already essential tools to monitor crops, predict droughts, map soil moisture, and detect early pests before they spread. Their data allows authorities and agronomists to anticipate food shortages and respond proactively, preventing local famines while supporting global supply chains.
What’s new is not the combination between agriculture and satellite data, but rather the use of AI and stronger computing power that makes unlocking far greater value from the data. Programs like Spire’s new partnership with LatConnect 60 use satellite insights to maximize irrigation, fertilizer use, and yield forecasting, which combats food insecurity while reducing environmental impact.
With the companies’ solution, farmers in Southeast Asia are beginning to catch up with more sophisticated operations, closing yield gaps of up to 40%, and bringing smaller operations closer to modern efficiency.
Powering Remote Communities
Reliable energy remains out of reach for millions. In fact, the World Bank estimates that 733 million people don’t have access to electricity, and another 1.18 billion are considered “energy poor,” lacking affordable, dependable power for basics like lighting, cooking and heating.
For decades, villages like Kewinal in Bolivia relied on diesel generators. Today, solar-powered microgrids paired with IoT systems are transforming energy access by generating and storing power locally. But these solutions still need steady and reliable connectivity, which in remote regions like the Andes is often a pressing issue.
This is where companies like Satelitot come in. The Barcelona based company uses a network of LEO nanosatellites to provide affordable NB-IoT connectivity in isolated regions, enabling real-time monitoring of energy production, battery performance, and solar output. With reliable connections, communities can now sustain their electricity to the benefit of local hospitals, schools, shops, and driving local development without forcing residents to relocate.
Protecting Earth and Space Assets
Space congestion is reaching a critical point. More than 14,000 satellites and 120 million pieces of debris are currently orbiting Earth, raising alarms among governments and commercial operators alike.
In response, space situational awareness (SSA) capabilities have become vital to track objects, reduce the risk of collisions and ensure the safety and security of both satellites and the on-the-ground infrastructure that depends on them.
Scotland has emerged as a leader in solving space sustainability challenges. The Space Scotland’s Environmental Task Force (ETF), a coalition of government, academia, and organizations like Scottish Enterprise and AstroAgency, developed the world’s first space sustainability roadmap, now being adopted as an industry benchmark.
But debris is only part of the threat. The potential weaponization of space could disrupt communications, navigation, infrastructure, missile defense, and vital civilian services such as disaster response and weather forecasting.
In Ukraine, the deployment of commercial constellations like Starlink has demonstrated the importance of space domain awareness (SDA) to ensure satellite availability, orbital awareness, and electromagnetic spectrum security. Russian counterspace threats and anti-satellite tests further underscore the value of early warnings and real-time monitoring.
Startup Spaceflux is stepping in to meet this critical need. By building Europe’s most advanced optical network to monitor low-Earth orbit and detect objects as small as 2.5 centimeters, the company delivers fast, actionable intelligence for governments and companies looking to protect assets in our increasingly crowded skies.
Looking Up to Solve Down
From predicting climate disasters to accelerating medical breakthroughs, boosting food security, powering remote communities, and safeguarding space assets, the answers to some of Earth’s most pressing challenges may not lie here at all, but in orbit. Space-for-Earth is showing that the key to solving our most urgent problems isn’t just about looking outward, but bringing space technology back home.
This article mentions a client of an Espacio portfolio company.
