By the year 2000, 20 nations will be operating their own remote-sensing spacecraft - including Australia, Brazil, Malaysia, South Africa, Korea, Taiwan and Thailand - according to a report due to be published later this year by the Aerospace Corporation and Euroconsult. As a result, the international Committee on Earth Observation Satellites (CEOS) is trying to rationalize these systems and reduce overlap.

For users of data this over-supply is fine. But for satellite operators it makes the prospects of earning profits very remote. Though seen for a long time as a potentially commercial application of space, remote-sensing is unlikely ever to generate significant profits.

The fact is, even with the large new communication satellite constellations like Iridium and Globalstar, satellite manufacturing and launch is going to remain a small business - just a few $billions per year world-wide. (For comparison, medium-size auto-makers have turnovers of $30 billion each.)

The space industry has still to face the fact that passenger-carrying is the only service identified to date that shows near-term promise of growing large enough to repay the nearly $trillion investment that governments have made in space technology to date. The trials of the remote-sensing community only help to confirm this.