The Earth observation industry, a growing segment of the aerospace market where satellites photograph points on the planet, is split between military and commercial.

The U.S. government and other international allies contract with companies like Westminster-based Maxar Intelligence that can use their satellites for intelligence operations such as tracking Russia’s military movements in Ukraine.

But finding an economical model that fits commercial uses is much harder, executives from leading geo-intelligence companies said Wednesday at a Space Symposium panel in Colorado Springs on the future of their industry.

The technology for satellite intelligence has been mostly maxed out, said Joe Morrison, vice president of growth at Umbra Space, as sensors can pinpoint places on earth to the millimeter.

“That’s already all built,” Morrison said. The future is “purely business model innovations.”

Startups and nonprofits can hire companies like Maxar, Umbra Space or Capella Space Corp. to collect data and images for uses such as monitoring deforestation, catching elephant poachers, disaster response planning or mining. But it can be expensive and timely to gather that information.

Militaries are more likely to pay the cost for life-saving missions.

“The value proposition in their markets is very different than the value proposition in military and intelligence,” said Frank Backes, CEO of Capella Space Corp., a California-based geo-intelligence company with a 32,000-square-foot office in Louisville, Colo.

But commercial uses of satellite intelligence is a “nascent” market, Backes said.

“We’re still trying to figure out the market economics that makes sense,” he added.

Maxar — the geospatial intelligence company headquartered in the metro Denver area that employs more than 2,600 people globally – captures about 3.8 million square kilometers of images each day, according to its website. 

But the Westminster institution isn’t seeing as many commercial customers as it wants, said the company’s General Manager of U.S. Government Susanne Hake.

“We certainly see some demand on the commercial side,” Hake said, “but not really as much as we would like.”

It comes down to budgets a lot of the time.

Another difficulty is that every industry has its own needs for satellite intelligence, so developing a unique product for every market a company like Maxar is targeting and then marketing and selling it to potential customers is unscalable, Hake said.

The best way currently is creating a “tailorable” service to meet the diverse sets of needs, she added.

Meanwhile, Virginia-based geospatial intelligence company Hawkeye 360 is all in on the military.

“It’s really hard to be very, very good at selling to the government and also at commercial sales,” said Hawkeye 360 CEO John Serafini.

“We’ve made our bed and our bed is the US government and our allies and making sure they’re 100% successful,” Serafini said. “And I don’t want to distract anyone in my company.”

Because of the market’s dynamics, Umbra Space’s Morrison said a lot of focus is on military intelligence, but there’s plenty of room to meet the needs of smaller companies with much smaller budgets.

But it’s hard to do that in a sustainable way, he added.

“The tragedy of working in this space is seeing the potential of it,” Morrison said, “and seeing just the surface that we’re scratching.”