MDA Space CEO Mike Greenley expressed strong opinions on the space economy and Earth observation during a Monday afternoon keynote at the Silicon Valley Space Week conference. He said that the space sector is likely to see “explosive” growth, which western analysts may well be underestimating, thanks to a shift from government to commercial clients.
He sounded a cautionary note, however, on Earth observation (EO) companies, which are still heavily reliant on national security government clients and haven’t found a solid commercial customer base. While the companies are competing, collaborating and innovating, this commercial gap is a “nut that’s still to be cracked” — a serious issue that’s keeping them from enjoying the “explosive” growth seen elsewhere in the space sector.
MDA’s changes and growth
As Greenley noted, MDA is uniquely positioned to speak on changes in the space market, having had a number of tumultuous changes of its own. Starting as Macdonald, Dettwiler and Associates, the company was a key player in the Canadian space industry for decades before being acquired by US-based Orbital Sciences in 1995 — the same year it launched the RADARSAT-1 satellite, a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite that was also Canada’s first commercial EO satellite. The company was re-acquired by Canadian investors in 2001, after Orbital Sciences spun it off, and eventually rebranded as Maxar Technologies in 2017, moving to the US in 2018 as it focused increasingly on the US government services market.
In 2020, three short years later, MDA’s assets were purchased from Maxar by investment firm Northern Private Capital, and the company returned to Canada; in 2024 it rebranded itself as the space-focused MDA Space, the company that Greenley heads now and called “a pure-play space company these days”
These are tumultuous changes, particularly since 2017, but Greenley said that they were also accompanied by comparatively rapid growth. The now-focused “pure play” MDA Space, Greenley said, is “doing $1 billion in revenue on space and can continue to grow it at a decent clip.” In fact the company has enjoyed about 25 to 30% a year of top-line revenue growth over the past few years, he said, and is anticipating to do the same over the next three to five. That success has led to a rising stock price for the publicly-traded MDA Space; Greenley said that the company’s stock price has risen from $6 CAD a share to around $22 CAD.
The global space market size question
Greenley said that this growth has gone hand-in-hand with “a growing space market and growing space sector.” While it’s common to presume that the sector is going to continue to see explosive growth, Greenley actually raised the question of whether the size of that upcoming market might be underestimated. While it’s common to talk about the global space economy, he said, as a “$600 billion a year market that’s on its way to $1.8 trillion a year by 2035” according to various American studies, he noted that China seems to believe that it will be far more lucrative than that.
Greenley said that “when you read the literature on the Earth-to-moon economic zone out of China…[they describe it “a ten trillion a year market in 2050”. While that’s a somewhat different time horizon, Greenley still said that it was interesting that “they are viewing the space opportunity as five to 10 times larger than the best economic estimates in this western side of the world.” He believes that suggests “there’s potentially even more for us to see in this, based on what others are seeing as they explore the space economy.”
Transition from government to commercial business
The key driver of that growth, Greenley believes, is the “transition from government to commercial based space businesses.” In the past, companies like MDA (and their predecessors) focused primarily on “building things and selling them to governments,” but that’s changed tremendously over the past while. Governments do still buy spacecraft and parts from private enterprise, but they’re also more and more reliant on private enterprise to provide space-based services: including communications, Earth observation and infrastructure.
He sees a big driver of the new space economy being governments’ “transition to purchasing commercial services.” That has lead to a “duality,” he said, where the increasing integration of commercial and governmental operations has risen to the point where “we’re seeing increasing levels of commercial personnel working in commercial integration cells inside departments of defence secure satellite operation centers”, as “military operations of satellites and commercial operations of satellites are very, very tightly interconnected.”
This transition to government-as-service-consumer is well-known; it’s a key part of NASA’s approach to low Earth orbit (LEO) going forward. This includes the retirement of the ISS and the development of privately-owned and operated space stations, which Greenley said “opens up a much more active conversation” regarding the growth of the business of providing space infrastructure.
But while government clients are the “anchor” and a still-very-necessary part of the space economy, Greenley said that what truly makes the space business accelerate is they start getting commercial clients. He said that “when any market lane opens up and becomes more commercial, it explodes, and it moves at a much faster pace,” pointing to the tremendous growth of the private space launch market as a great example. In MDA’s case, he said that they have “about a $13 billion pipeline right now of constellations that we’re bidding digital satellites into, with customers that are interested in working in broadband networks, direct-to-device communications, and the Internet of Things.” “Almost all that pipeline is commercial,” he said, “and it is explosive.”
Even aside from communications, he sees the growth of the private space stations as potentially transformative as well. Governments are likely to remain the “anchor” customers for the foreseeable future, but Greenley said that the industrial potential of the satellites is what’s truly intriguing. “Medical companies, pharmaceutical companies, and a range of industries” are looking at the possibilities of microgravity for producing novel therapeutics and other products, and the stations are likely to enjoy steady growth in companies exploring these possibilities over the near term. If the companies hit on successful products, then Greenley said that the space stations could become more akin to “space industrial parks” over the next few years.
Earth observation “last to the party”
There was one part of the space sector, however, where Greenley sounded a less optimistic and more cautious note: Earth observation. Greenley said that EO would be “last to the party” for explosive commercial growth, raising the question of whether EO will even achieve it at all over the near term.
Greenley was clear that EO was still very much reliant on one all-important clientele: national security and defence. “What I see,” he said, “is that [you] still need a really strong defence and intelligence customer base if you’re going to have a larger scale Earth observation business,” and that having that base is all-important for any kind of scale-up. EO companies are looking for commercial clients; Greenley said that “we all dream about it [and] all work on it,” but “we’re not seeing that in Earth observation data and services.” There are smaller clients that are suitable for smaller companies, but any company aiming to scale beyond a “10 to $20 million a year business” has little choice but to focus on acquiring and retaining government clients focused on defence and intelligence.
This isn’t for lack of innovation or willingness to collaborate. Greenley said that government-commercial collaboration is very much present in the EO market, as is an overall collaborative approach to service provision. “It’s about collaboration between [satellite constellations] and between companies,” he said, as the industry transitions to providing multi-sensor information products for customers. An example he gave was the Maritime Information Platform (MIPS), which provides invaluable information used for dark vessel detection in tracking illegal fishing and maritime security issues. EO companies can now give them a “sensor-fused information source for their maritime economic zones or maritime areas of interest,” using not just MDA’s radar sensors but information provided by their partners.
The work they’re doing in providing accessible information for government clients is creating “an innovation path”, he said, which is driving “current growth and future activity in the Earth observation sector.”
The issue is that the “breakthrough” of commercial clients for EO simply hasn’t happened yet, as the companies lack the so-called “killer app” that brings EO into the commercial mainstream. EO companies’ challenge is to convince corporations that this information is “critical to their competitiveness in the market and their business success.”
He believes that “advanced product management” is key to overcoming this issue, so that EO companies can “figure out how to configure [these] increasingly fused information sources [into cohesive and accessible] information products” which invite persistent work from private corporations. This is, he said, what may help EO break out of the “pockets of little bursts of commercial activity” that they’re seeing now, and start becoming a space-based corporate mainstay like communications or launch.
In the question-and-answer session, he elaborated on the issue. He said that defence and commercial work aren’t mutually exclusive. “Defence and intelligence is a rock,” he said, “and there are solid needs for that around the world.” That rock of defence work “gives us that solid foundation to stand on” as companies look for commercial applications. He said that the “nut that’s still to be cracked” for EO is finding enterprises that see critical importance in “near real-time [change detection information] on the Earth’s surface.” In order to open up the market, EO companies “all have to work together…to find out what the major differentiating thing [is] that some corporation can’t live without.”
“We’ve got lots of little ones,” he said, “but in terms of the big ones, that drive big stuff, I think that’s still to come.”