Independent research group

Earth and space,
one economy.

Humanity is becoming a spacefaring civilization — and the faster we move industry into orbit and beyond, the more room Earth has to recover. We build the satellite data and open models that help the space economy scale quickly and responsibly: measuring where it's growing — often visible from orbit before the launch numbers show it — and the case that expanding off-planet is worth it.

See what we're building →How we work

$1.8T projected space economy by 2035·open methods & data· US-based research group

The idea

We look up.

For most of history, we looked down for what we needed. We dug, we burned, and we wore the planet thin to keep growing.

Space EcoVision studies the other direction. If energy and raw materials can come from orbit and beyond, Earth can do less of the heavy lifting — and start to recover. We call that shift the Great Inversion.

It is not a slogan. It is a claim that can be measured: where industry moves, what it unlocks, and what the planet gets back. Proving that case is the work.

What we're building

Measurement first.

Good decisions need evidence, and most of the space economy still has none. We build the tools to measure it — in the open, one piece at a time.

Earth observation

Reading satellite imagery to track how spaceports physically grow — then comparing that buildout against how often each site actually launches. Open ESA Sentinel-2 imagery plus public launch records.

In development

First results: Starbase's built-up area grew 22%→71% (2019–2023) while launches stayed low — ground footprint scaled before the cadence did. A U-Net CV model trained on real Sentinel-2 + ESA WorldCover tiles now sharpens the signal (val IoU 0.44, live on Hugging Face).

View on GitHub →Model on Hugging Face →

Economic models

Models of how resources move between Earth and orbit, built on ecological-economics methods — so the cost and benefit of shifting industry off-planet can be estimated, not just asserted.

Early

First step: a baseline set of measurable indicators for emerging markets.

View on GitHub →

Research library

A structured, searchable base of space treaties, national policy, launch records, and economic reports — built to help researchers and policymakers find evidence quickly.

Planned

First step: assemble and clean the source corpus.

View on GitHub →

Approach

How we work.

Reading satellite imagery at scale, and training models to make sense of it, takes real computing power — the part that does not fit on a laptop. Access to that compute is what lets a small, open research group do work that usually needs an institution behind it.

Measure, don't assert

Every claim we make should trace back to data someone else can check. If we can't measure it yet, we say so.

Open by default

Methods, code, and datasets are public as they develop. Early and rough beats polished and hidden.

One system, end to end

Earth and space treated as a single economy — studied by a small, independent research group based in the United States.

Get in touch

Working on the space economy?
So are we.

We're an open research group. If you have the skills and the drive to measure this properly — student, academic, or industry veteran — we want to hear from you. A few puzzles we're working on right now:

Biologists & ecologists

Sustainable scaling

Help spaceports measure and manage their environmental footprint — so launch sites can grow and clear review faster.

Physicists & geospatial analysts

Orbital data

Map out usable data sources, including hyperspectral and SAR imagery.

Machine-learning engineers

Scaling the models

Move our first pipeline toward an automated computer-vision system.

connect@spaceecovision.org