Infrastructure
In 2020, over 2,500 infrastructure projects were announced across the world—a 5.5% increase over 2019—highlighting a growing global priority to modernize and maintain critical systems. Today, that momentum has evolved into a broader shift toward resilient, data-driven infrastructure driven by climate risk, urban expansion, and technological advancement. Crumbling civil infrastructure across the world is a direct result of climate change, natural disaster, and poor human design and repair.
A large-scale solution to monitoring the state of Earth’s infrastructure is satellite-based monitoring. Satellite-based synthetic aperture radar interferometry, known as InSAR, has continuous, all-weather monitoring capabilities and the power to oversee mass movements on Earth’s surface, allowing urban city planners to mount timely responses to critical infrastructure needs. Bird.i is a satellite service that curates the world’s latest satellite imagery for project planning, construction monitoring, and land maintenance. Highlighting the unique power of scale when it comes to infrastructure, Bird.i makes imagery more accessible for viewing a site’s location, land use, scale, and proximity to key access points.
At the same time, space itself is becoming a form of infrastructure—not just a tool for observing it. Massive satellite constellations such as SpaceX’s Starlink, Amazon’s Project Kuiper, and national systems from China are building global digital networks in orbit, delivering connectivity at unprecedented scale. The European Union’s IRIS² initiative, a planned constellation of approximately 290 satellites, aims to provide secure communications infrastructure across the region by 2030. These systems are transforming orbit into an extension of Earth’s critical infrastructure, supporting everything from communications to real-time data processing.
Satellite technology allows governments and corporations to make better-informed decisions regarding the buildings, bridges, and roads that house and support civilization. As space-based systems and terrestrial infrastructure become increasingly interconnected, maintaining life on Earth will depend as much on what happens in orbit as what happens on the ground. Space matters.