Earth observation data: Multibillion-dollar opportunity -- or dud?

VCs are getting serious about space-related startups, and there are some truly exponential growth opportunities in the SpaceTech ecosystem. But the majority of money that went into SpaceTech last year was in just two deals -- a 1 billion fundraise for SpaceX and a 500 million raise for OneWeb. If you ignore those as outliers, SpaceTech funding in 2015 was only around 300 million. The segment of startups seeing the most VC attention is the earth observation (EO) segment. Companies building earth observation (EO) satellite constellations (basically, cameras put into orbit and photographing the Earth on a regular basis) pulled in more than half the SpaceTech funding from 2012 to 2015 and 72% in 2015.