Where space exploration meets geospatial: a growing connection

Leveraging satellite imagery, Earth observation is a prime example of where the geospatial field intersects with the space exploration industry. This point of intersection is currently where the greatest potential lies, thanks for instance to advances in data, artificial intelligence and sensor systems built by the geospatial sector to train the data, according to ETH Zurich's Thomas Zurbuchen – the man who led NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope programme to launch and into scientific operation. In this exclusive interview with GIM International, his inspiring insights put our planet – and our industry – in a cosmic perspective.

What does your current role entail, and which mission, vision and ambitions guide you in your work?

After joining ETH Zurich in August 2023, I started a programme focused on three activities. The first one is to build the – so far – only master’s space educational programme in Switzerland, because if you want to build an industry, you need talent. The second goal is to expand an existing activity focused on startups as part of the ESA BIC (Business Incubation Centre, Ed.) programme. We have one of the nodes here at ETH, and we’re in contact with around 75 startups at any time. The third aspect is to enhance the research impact of space, and building the infrastructure to do so.

Underlying those three focus areas is the belief that space creates opportunities in a large domain: not just in engineering, but also in science, and especially – of course – in Earth observation and everything that relates to living on the best, most beautiful planet we’ve ever seen in the universe, which is ours.

As associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA, you led the world’s foremost programme for conducting science in and from space, which included launching the James Webb Space Telescope. When it comes to mapping the Earth’s environment, what can surveyors and other geospatial professionals learn from the space industry?

Whether exploring space or looking at the Earth, what matters is to make observations that provide context. In astrophysics, for example, that means having the right wavelength-range coverage and the right resolution to look at the universe’s first-generation galaxies, which was one of the James Webb Space Telescope’s prime objectives. In Earth science, I would say space gives the right context for looking at our own planet, including with respect to local impacts. Here in Switzerland, we recently had ‘coloured’ rain caused by desert sand from the Sahara being carried to us. It’s not unusual. But to understand the air over Switzerland, or anywhere, you need to understand the planet, and the best place to do that is from is space. The same is true for air pollution. In the US, for example, close to a quarter of all air pollution over California is actually Asian air pollution blown in from the Pacific. And a similar thing happens elsewhere, of course. The Earth is a complex interconnected system of systems, and the best place to observe it is in and from space. This also goes for mapping the Earth for other purposes.

How does geospatial data influence space exploration and astronomy?

Let’s take weather satellites as an example, because as part of the programme I ran at NASA, we also built weather satellites for the civil agencies in the USA. You can only launch if it’s the right weather – and not just on the ground, but also at all gradients all the way up through the atmosphere. I always found it slightly amusing that when we were trying to launch a weather satellite, the most important input to ensure the safety of that launch was data from a weather satellite that was already up there! Another thing is that all the aeronautics in space contribute to pollution on Earth – albeit accounting for less than 2% of all CO₂ produced by humanity, but nonetheless it’s a contributor. I think such imperatives help us think not only how we act today, but how we act in the future with respect to our environment. So whether locally or strategically, the Earth sets important boundary conditions – which can be expressed as geospatial data – that are absolutely crucial when making space-exploration decisions.

The purpose of ETH Zurich Space is to create synergies between all the space activities at ETH Zurich. How does this look in practice, and what are some standout initiatives or partnerships?

One of the things I’m most excited about is our partnership with multiple ETH professors in the area of earth observation. It’s focused on taking space data gathered using all kinds of technologies, from Lidar to gravity measurements and multispectral or even hyperspectral images. Switzerland’s small size and topographic diversity is an advantage: we have a very diverse dataset, thanks to the high mountains and the permafrost of the Alps. The question is, how do we take all this data and structure it to allow us to use modern techniques such as artificial intelligence and sensor systems we build here to train the data? By combining the space data with distributed sensors and drones, in which we already have a strong leadership component in Switzerland, as well as advanced analysis techniques, this will be a good example of integrating space data for the benefit of humanity – whether in precision farming, environmental monitoring, prediction and prevention of landslides and other natural dangers, or whatever.

Looking back, which key lessons from your NASA period continue to influence your work in your current role?

I had the enormous honour to work on 130-plus missions, of which 37 launched into space during my time as head of NASA, and a significant fraction of the missions consisted of Earth observation systems. I learned two critical lessons. First of all, it is the importance of the team for success. In fact, I’m much more optimistic than I used to be, because even though the missions were very hard and we struggled with many issues, I’ve seen what teams can do! Almost like magic, they can achieve missions that are full of miracles. The second lesson, whether by looking closely and thinking carefully about our own planet or looking in the deep universe or looking at samples from Bennu (a relatively small asteroid that passes close to Earth approximately every six years and was the target of the USA’s first asteroid-sampling mission: NASA’s successful OSIRIS-Rex mission, Ed.), is that nature is full of surprises and full of absolute beauty.

NASA’s slogan is ‘failure is not an option’. How does this align with the development of new space technologies, and especially ones that no one has ever dared to try before?

That’s really interesting. The phrase ‘failure is not an option’ is a quote by Gene Kranz who was flight director on the ground during the Apollo 13 mission, when astronauts were brought back to Earth after a life-threatening engine failure. To a certain extent, that phrase has been the agency’s biggest blessing. When you’re working with astronauts, for example, or on the James Webb Space Telescope – which was a multi-continent investment of close to USD10 billion – you know that failure is an ever-present possibility. But the slogan focuses your mind on performing to the very best of your ability to reduce the risk of death, or the likelihood that a failure will dominate the mission. However, ‘failure is not an option’ has also been a curse, because ‘one-size-fits-all’ thinking about risk artificially increases the price of missions, thus slowing progress in understanding our planet and our universe. Without a failure-averse mindset, it would be possible to do many more missions and many more observations using technologies that are much faster and more advanced, even though we might fail from time to time. We should take more risks when it comes to new technologies for looking at our own planet and beyond.

That sounds like a relevant lesson for the geospatial industry as well. What else could geospatial professionals learn from the space industry’s principles?

One critical principle is that innovation and iteration always go together. Innovation means doing something for the first time to achieve a purpose, while iteration is actually a polite word for failure. If somebody attempts something difficult, we want to encourage them, not to say ‘Hey, it could fail’. Of course it could fail; that is absolutely clear. It’s innovation. But whether what we thought would work doesn’t initially work the way we expected, or whether there is room for further improvement, it always requires iteration. If we stop iterating, we are not trying hard enough and that holds back innovation. Europe is currently one of the world leaders in the geospatial industry, but if we want to maintain that leadership role in the future, we need to innovate! That means supporting startups with the same energy and investment that they’re boosted elsewhere: not just in the US, but also China, Japan, India – there’s a whole burgeoning sector. I’m excited about the activities that are happening in Europe, but I just think there’s more to do there.

Still on the topic of innovation, how does academic research lead to the development of real-world solutions in the space industry, and how could that approach be translated to the geospatial and Earth observation sector?

I think it’s important to recognize that the whole process of doing research is ultimately about not just learning something new, but also sharing that information. So, while the research is an important part, scaling the results and making them useful is what really matters – especially in view of the opportunities but also the challenges we have we have on Earth. Think, for example, of making data about climate change of natural hazards available in the same way as we have access to weather data on our phones. Experience shows that the best-scaled solutions often get scaled by private industry, whether it’s a startup or an existing company that decides to invest in the idea. The geospatial industry is a good example of where the scalability of such solutions is in startups that come out of universities. But it’s critical that universities understand the commercial mechanisms and continue to support their students in scaling up their research findings for the benefit of humanity.

Both Switzerland and the USA, where you have spent a large part of your career, have been very fertile ground for startups, including geospatial startups. Which key factors create a climate of innovation?

A good environment for innovation has three ingredients: really good people with great ideas, the ability for those ideas to be built out, and the ability for those ideas to be scaled with funding. Looking at Europe, we have some amazingly talented people, and some of the systems for developing their ideas – whether at ETH, in the Netherlands or in many other European regions – are among the best in the world. There are pre-seed and seed opportunities, angel investors or other investment programmes. That’s very good.

But I think there are two challenges. Firstly, even though Europe is unified in many ways – through the European Union or the Schengen Area – in practice, companies still often have to expand country by country, facing different regulations, languages and market dynamics in each one. That fragmentation reduces the effective market size, making it harder for a company to become profitable at scale. The USA has built an ecosystem around a truly unified single market, which makes it much easier to raise funding at various stages. In contrast, Europe is still lagging behind in this respect, especially in space-related industries. Secondly, we need an environment that’s encouraging for people who are trying, even though their likelihood of big financial success is less than 50% or perhaps less than 10% even. And if somebody fails, do they have to hide for the rest of their life or can they try again? I spend a lot of time trying to convince people that we need to actively build an ecosystem that supports entrepreneurs – one that encourages them instead of criticizing them or treating failure as something shameful.

How could the geospatial industry and the space sector combine their unique strengths to create synergies that drive innovation and unlock new opportunities for addressing our planet’s global challenges?

In my opinion, there’s no place in the entire space sector with more opportunity right now than the intersection of the space industry and the geospatial industry. We already have a rich set of data – e.g. the Copernicus programme, NASA’s missions – as well as dozens of sensors and spacecraft collecting data as we speak, and much of it is publicly available. So, lots of data and sensors are there, but there’s still room for innovation – and not just in new sensors. We have seen a new spectral type of measurements, for example, from space that can be combined with the data technologies that are now coming to the forefront. Artificial intelligence and machine learning have been with us for a long time, of course, and are already being used in the geospatial industry, but the scale of the ability of such solutions is incredibly promising right now. I really think it’s the right time to build a startup at that intersection, and I would like to encourage a whole set of entrepreneurs to do so. In our observations here in Zurich, more than a third – and perhaps even half – of all startups are ‘downstream’ ones looking at how space data can be utilized on Earth as opposed to a new gadget or a new spacecraft.

Returning to orbit, how could closer collaboration between the space, astronomy and geospatial sectors further enhance our understanding of the universe and support missions beyond Earth, including those elsewhere in our solar system?

All observations we’ve ever done have first been observations of the Earth, whether infrared measurements, Lidar measurements and so on. These can then be launched to other planets so we can learn about Mars, the oceans below the icy surface of Europa, and Jupiter’s atmospheric structure, for instance. In that sense, Earth observation is the basis for what’s possible elsewhere. It’s also true that while technologies such as telescopes differ, the spacecraft used is basically the same. Therefore, developing platforms for Earth observation also supports the creation of platforms for astronomy and remote observations of other important space-related science.

Moving even deeper into space, if you had to envision the successor of the James Webb Space Telescope, which extra capabilities would you add?

Ideally, we should build a spacecraft that’s able to look at the atmospheres of planets like Earth. Currently, the planetary atmospheres we’re able to look at with the James Webb are not like Earth; they’re like mini-Neptunes (near infrared stars) or Jupiters (near sun-like stars). To build a spacecraft that can observe other exoplanets which have atmospheric compositions equivalent to Earth would require a system that’s probably a little bit bigger than James Webb and is way more stable – by a factor of 10 to 50. Then we could direct and integrate as that planet disappears behind the star and reappears, take cuts through the atmosphere and really look at its composition. The goal, of course, is not only to learn about planetary atmospheres, but also to look at traces for life elsewhere. That’s the telescope we’re dreaming about.

What message do you have for our readership of geospatial and Earth observation professionals?

I’m deeply convinced that in a world where many of the threats stem from nature – whether it’s severe weather conditions, climate change or the societal challenges we face – it’s the geospatial professionals who keep us safe, and also keep us looking forwards and understanding our future living environment. In fact, I can’t think of a community that’s more strategically important in terms of the well-being of our children and also of our planet. So, I just really hope that the geospatial community remains healthy and that new, talented and passionate people continue to join it.

About Thomas Zurbuchen

Thomas Zurbuchen has been leading ETH Zurich Space since August 2023 and serves as a full professor of Space Science and Technology in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at ETH Zurich. From October 2016 until the end of 2022, Zurbuchen was NASA’s longest-serving associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate. During his tenure, NASA launched 37 science missions and initiated 54 more, including landmark projects such as the James Webb Space Telescope, the Perseverance and Ingenuity Mars missions, and the asteroid-deflecting DART mission. He played a pivotal role in shaping these missions and guiding them to success. Prior to his work at ETH and NASA, Zurbuchen was a professor of Space Science and Aerospace Engineering at the University of Michigan. He is also featured prominently in the Netflix documentary Unknown: Cosmic Time Machine, which follows a team of scientists and engineers in their ambitious effort to launch the James Webb Space Telescope – which can safely be considered as a major leap forward in humanity’s understanding of the universe.