A few days ago, Philippine President Marcos announced that the island nation will build a spaceport and test-launch a rocket from Cagayan next year — a partnership with Perigee Aerospace, a Korean company.

Since then, the reactions online have mostly been the same joke in different outfits: look how small the rocket is, why are we doing this when we have real problems at home.

Fair enough. But let me tell you about another small, broke country on the edge of a continent it didn’t matter to.

In the 16th century, England was a poor island kingdom, dwarfed by France’s armies and Spain’s galleons — the biggest ships on the biggest empire the ocean had ever seen. Nobody in Madrid was losing sleep over England.

Then a handful of English privateers — in other words, pirates !!! — took their rinky-dink boats out into water that supposedly belonged to Spain and Portugal, with Queen Elizabeth quietly backing them from the shadows. It wasn’t a grand strategy. It was a small, scrappy, half-legal bet. Two centuries later, that bet became the British Empire.

So yes — the first Philippine rocket will be small. It definitely looks unimpressive next to a Falcon 9. That’s not the point. The point is that you don’t get a space program by skipping the small, embarrassing first step. You get one by taking it anyway.

We don’t need to win space on day one. We need to start plotting a course.

Maybe, somewhere down that course, we get to be space pirates too.

Vicente Diño is the writer and publisher behind Galleon Space — a newsletter covering the space economy in Southeast Asia and Latin America | @GalleonSpace

More than four and a half centuries ago, the Galleon Trade ushered in a Spain-led global economy and financed the growth of Spanish colonies on both sides of the Pacific.

On one end of that route, Manila became the hub — the gathering point where spices from Indonesia and silk from China were consolidated before making the crossing to Spanish America, and from there on to Europe. On the other end, Acapulco played the mirror role, the hub where silver from the mines of Bolivia and Mexico was gathered and shipped west to Asia. Neither city set the terms of the trade that ran through it. Both simply happened to sit where the geography demanded a port.

More than four and a half centuries hence, the pattern is repeating, and it’s worth watching closely because the terms are still being written.

The Philippines has announced a spaceport in Northern Luzon, with an explicit vision of becoming the hub for space launches in the Asia-Pacific region. But the Philippines isn’t alone in reaching for that role. Indonesia is pushing Biak Island as a launch site. Malaysia, in partnership with China, has its own plans for a launch facility in the Pahang region. Three countries, one ambition, on Manila’s side of the old route.

On the other side of the Pacific, the race is further along. Two launch facilities are already operational — the Guiana Space Center in French Guiana, and the Alcântara Space Center in Brazil — and a third is in development, a commercial spaceport near Oviedo in the Dominican Republic’s Pedernales province, backed by the Florida-based firm Launch on Demand. Three sites, in various stages of maturity, on Acapulco’s side.

Just as Manila and Acapulco became the two economic hubs of a Spain-led global economy four and a half centuries ago, these six facilities — operational and proposed — are now vying to become the new economic hubs of the emerging space economy.

The question worth asking isn’t which of them will get built. It’s which of them, this time, ends up owning a piece of the trade that runs through it — rather than just supplying the harbor.

Vicente Diño is the writer and publisher behind Galleon Space — a newsletter covering the space economy in Southeast Asia and Latin America | @GalleonSpace

Here’s the thing about looking down at Earth from orbit—it turns out the view is worth a fortune, especially when you point your sensors at places nobody was bothering to photograph properly. And for a long time, that described enormous swaths of both regions. Which brings us to why your term sheets and your engineering roadmaps should both have these two regions circled in red.

The Setup: Big, Green, Wet, and Underserved

Let’s start with the geography, because geography is destiny in the imaging business. Southeast Asia is roughly 650 million people spread across an archipelago (looking at you, Indonesia and the Philippines) so fragmented that mapping it by conventional means is a special kind of nightmare. Latin America gives you the Amazon basin, the Andes, thousands of kilometers of coastline, and agricultural operations that range from precision-managed soybean empires to smallholder farms that have never appeared on anyone’s spreadsheet.

Both regions share a delightful combination of traits that make them satellite imaging goldmines: they’re economically dynamic, resource-dependent, prone to natural disasters, chronically under-mapped by ground-based methods, and frequently obscured by cloud cover that makes optical imaging an adventure. That last one sounds like a bug. It’s actually the setup for a punchline we’ll get to shortly involving radar.

The core value proposition is almost embarrassingly simple. These are places where a lot of money rides on knowing what’s happening across huge areas of land and water, and where sending people to physically check is expensive, slow, or occasionally hazardous. A satellite doesn’t care about bad roads, doesn’t need a visa, and doesn’t file overtime. It just keeps looking.

Agriculture: Where the Real Money Grows

If there’s one use case that pays the bills across both regions, it’s agriculture. Latin America is a global breadbasket—Brazil and Argentina alone move staggering volumes of soy, corn, coffee, and sugar. Southeast Asia runs on rice, palm oil, rubber, and an increasingly anxious relationship with all three.

Satellite imaging lets agribusinesses and lenders do things that used to require armies of field agents. Crop health monitoring through multispectral imaging (measuring how plants reflect light in bands your eyeball can’t see) reveals stressed fields before a human would notice anything wrong. Yield prediction from orbit lets traders and insurers price risk with something better than vibes. For the palm oil industry specifically, imaging can track plantation expansion—useful both for operators optimizing their estates and for everyone downstream trying to prove their supply chain didn’t bulldoze a rainforest last Tuesday.

That last point matters more every year. As European and North American buyers demand deforestation-free supply chains, the ability to prove where your palm oil or beef or soy actually came from becomes a compliance requirement, not a nice-to-have. Satellite imaging is the only practical way to verify land use at continental scale. Founders, take note: “regulatory tailwind” is the sweetest phrase in the English language, and this is one.

The financing angle deserves special attention. Smallholder farmers across both regions are often invisible to formal credit systems because lenders can’t assess their operations. Imaging changes that math. If you can verify a farmer’s plot, monitor the crop, and confirm the harvest, you can underwrite a loan you’d otherwise have refused. That’s not just a business opportunity; it’s the kind of financial inclusion story that makes both your impact-fund LPs and your revenue projections happy at the same time.

Disasters: The Grim but Genuine Market

Nobody wants to build a business on catastrophe, but both regions serve up a steady supply, and imaging is genuinely the tool that helps.

Southeast Asia sits in a geographic neighborhood that includes typhoons, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and floods, sometimes in inconvenient combinations. The Philippines alone gets battered by an average of about twenty tropical cyclones a year. Latin America contributes hurricanes, earthquakes, and the occasional volcanic surprise. When these events hit, the first thing responders need—and the first thing they usually lack—is a clear picture of what just happened over a wide area.

Satellite imaging provides rapid damage assessment when roads are impassable and communications are down. It maps flood extent, identifies collapsed infrastructure, and helps route aid where it’s actually needed rather than where someone guessed. Insurers use the same imagery to process claims faster and detect fraud. Governments use it for early warning and evacuation planning. This is a market where the customer base includes national disaster agencies, multilateral organizations, insurers, and NGOs—a diverse enough set of buyers that no single budget cycle can sink you.

The Cloud Problem, and Why Radar Is the Hero

Now, that punchline about clouds. Both regions are aggressively tropical across large areas, which means optical satellites—the ones that take pretty pictures using visible light—spend a frustrating amount of time photographing the tops of clouds. Very majestic. Completely useless for checking on a rice paddy.

Enter Synthetic Aperture Radar, or SAR, which sees through clouds, works at night, and generally refuses to be intimidated by weather. SAR has gone from exotic to increasingly affordable as a wave of startups has driven down the cost of putting radar in orbit. For monsoon-soaked Southeast Asia and the cloud-wrapped Amazon, SAR isn’t a fancy option; it’s often the only sensor that reliably works. Any imaging business serious about these regions needs a cloud-penetration story, and “we’ll wait for a clear day” is not a story—it’s a stall tactic your competitors will exploit.

The technical crowd reading this already knows where the interesting engineering problems live: SAR data is harder to process and interpret than optical, the analysis pipelines are less mature, and turning radar returns into insights a palm oil executive can act on requires real work. That difficulty is the moat. If it were easy, everyone would have done it.

Logistics Companies: Seeing the Whole Supply Chain from Above

Logistics is fundamentally a business about knowing where things are and how fast they can move—which is precisely what a satellite is good at. In regions where a shipment might travel by truck over questionable roads, transfer to a barge, cross a congested port, and then vanish into an archipelago, imaging offers visibility that ground systems simply can’t match.

Consider port monitoring. Southeast Asian ports like Manila, Jakarta’s Tanjung Priok, and Laem Chabang in Thailand suffer chronic congestion, and Latin American gateways like Santos in Brazil and Callao in Peru face similar bottlenecks. Satellite imagery lets logistics operators and their customers count ships waiting at anchor, measure how full container yards are, and estimate berthing delays—all without a single phone call to a port authority that may or may not answer. A freight forwarder who can see that Santos has forty vessels queued offshore can reroute or renegotiate before the delay becomes their problem. Firms like Spire Global already sell exactly this kind of maritime tracking intelligence, combining vessel signals with orbital observation.

Road and infrastructure intelligence matters too. Before committing to an overland route through, say, Mindanao or the Peruvian highlands, a logistics planner can use recent imagery to confirm that a bridge still exists, a road hasn’t washed out in the last monsoon, and a mountain pass isn’t blocked by a landslide. In disaster-prone regions this is the difference between a delivery and a very expensive lesson. After a typhoon, imaging shows which routes survived, letting relief logistics and commercial delivery alike route around the damage.

Then there’s warehouse and inventory intelligence. Concerned that a supplier’s stockpile isn’t as full as they claim? Time-series imagery of a distribution yard—counting parked trucks, measuring stacked goods, watching activity levels—gives a logistics buyer a fact-check that no glossy capacity report can match. This is the same technique hedge funds famously use to count cars in retail parking lots, applied to supply chains that are otherwise opaque.

Construction Companies: Progress You Can Prove

Construction across both regions is booming—Indonesia is literally building a new capital city, Nusantara, from scratch in the Bornean jungle, and infrastructure spending from Mexico to the Philippines is running hot. Satellite imaging turns megaproject chaos into something you can measure week by week.

The killer application is construction progress monitoring. A high-frequency imaging feed lets project owners, contractors, and lenders track whether a site is actually advancing on schedule or quietly slipping while everyone insists things are fine. For a sprawling project like Nusantara or a new expressway cutting across Luzon, no site manager can physically observe the entire footprint. A satellite can, capturing the whole thing in a single pass and flagging the section where nothing has moved in a month.

Site selection and feasibility get a boost too. Before breaking ground, imagery and elevation data reveal terrain, drainage, flood risk, existing structures, and access routes. A contractor bidding on a project in a region they don’t know well can assess the site from orbit before committing a single survey crew. In flood-prone areas like metro Jakarta—parts of which are literally sinking—understanding water risk before you build is not optional.

There’s also a compliance and dispute-resolution angle that construction executives will appreciate. Time-stamped imagery provides an independent record of what happened on-site and when. Did the subcontractor pour the foundation on the date they billed for? Did unauthorized clearing extend beyond the permitted boundary? When a dispute lands in arbitration—and in large regional projects, it often does—an objective orbital timeline is a beautiful thing to have in your evidence file. Companies like Planet Labs, with their daily-refresh imagery of the entire landmass, have built much of their commercial pitch around exactly this kind of change detection.

Real Estate Companies: Location Intelligence, Literally from Space

Real estate has always been about location, and satellite imaging is location intelligence in its purest form. For developers and investors operating across fast-changing regional cities, the ability to watch neighborhoods evolve from orbit is a genuine edge.

Start with development monitoring and market analysis. A developer eyeing land on the fringe of Ho Chi Minh City, Bogotá, or Cebu can use time-series imagery to watch how the surrounding area is densifying—new roads, new buildings, new commercial activity. Growth patterns visible from space are leading indicators of where land values are heading. Spot the infrastructure going in before the crowd does, and you buy at the right price. This is grunt-work market research that used to require boots on the ground, now available as a data subscription.

Site assessment and due diligence come next. Before acquiring a parcel, imagery confirms what’s actually there versus what the seller claims. Are there squatter settlements, environmental hazards, unmapped structures, or encroachments? In markets where land records can be, let’s say, aspirational, an independent orbital look is cheap insurance. Elevation and flood-risk data layered on top tells a coastal developer in the Philippines or a hillside project in Medellín whether they’re building somewhere that stays dry.

For larger portfolios, there’s ongoing asset and portfolio monitoring. A real estate investment trust holding properties scattered across an archipelago or a continent can monitor those assets and their surroundings without dispatching inspectors to each one. Imaging flags when a new competitor breaks ground next door, when access roads change, or when the neighborhood character shifts in ways that affect value. Established geospatial players like Esri have built entire platforms around turning this kind of imagery into the maps and dashboards that real estate teams actually use.

Financial Institutions: Underwriting What You Can See

Financial institutions are, at their core, in the business of pricing uncertainty—and satellite imaging is a machine for reducing it. Across both regions, banks, insurers, investors, and lenders are discovering that a view from orbit sharpens decisions that used to rest on self-reported data and hope.

The agricultural lending case, mentioned earlier, deserves elaboration here because it’s so concrete. A bank lending to farmers across rural Indonesia or the Brazilian interior traditionally faced a brutal information problem: it couldn’t verify the borrower’s land, monitor the crop, or confirm the harvest without expensive field visits. Imaging solves all three. The lender can confirm the plot exists and is planted, watch crop health through the season, and estimate the yield backing the loan. Fintech and agri-finance startups across both regions are building lending products on exactly this foundation, extending credit to farmers who were previously uncreditworthy purely for lack of data.

Insurance is arguably the richest vein. Parametric crop insurance—which pays out automatically based on measurable conditions rather than slow, contested claims adjustment—depends on objective data, and satellite imaging supplies it. If orbital measurements show a region’s vegetation fell below a drought threshold, the policy pays, no adjuster required. For smallholder farmers in the Philippines or Central America who can’t afford or access traditional crop insurance, this model is transformative, and it’s only possible because a satellite can measure conditions across thousands of scattered farms at once. Property and disaster insurers use the same imagery for rapid post-event claims processing and fraud detection: when a typhoon hits, before-and-after imagery shows exactly which insured properties were damaged.

Then there’s alternative data for investment. This is where the finance crowd leans in. Asset managers and analysts increasingly buy imagery-derived signals to inform trades and valuations—counting ships at a Brazilian iron ore terminal to estimate export volumes, monitoring activity at Southeast Asian industrial parks, tracking construction at a competitor’s new facility, or gauging retail foot traffic by counting cars. In markets where official statistics are delayed, incomplete, or occasionally creative, an independent orbital data source is worth paying for. Firms like Orbital Insight built entire businesses turning imagery into economic indicators, and the appetite in emerging markets—where the information gap is widest—is substantial.

Finally, ESG and green finance. As banks and funds pour money into sustainability-linked lending and carbon projects across both regions, they need to verify that the environmental promises attached to their capital are being kept. Is the reforestation project actually reforesting? Did the borrower who pledged zero deforestation keep that pledge? Satellite imaging is the verification layer that keeps green finance honest, and as this asset class grows, so does demand for the monitoring underneath it.

Maritime, Mining, and Everything in Between

Beyond the headliners, both regions offer a buffet of secondary applications that together add up to serious money.

Southeast Asia contains some of the busiest and most contested waters on Earth, along with fishing grounds where illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing costs legitimate economies billions. Imaging combined with vessel-tracking data catches the boats that switch off their transponders and hope nobody’s looking. Somebody is now looking, from orbit, and that somebody has a subscription business.

Mining and infrastructure development across both regions generate constant demand for monitoring—tracking construction progress, watching for illegal mining operations, assessing environmental compliance, and keeping an eye on the tailings dams whose failures make catastrophic headlines. Urban planning in rapidly growing cities from Jakarta to São Paulo needs current imagery to manage sprawl that outpaces every official map. Carbon markets, still finding their footing, will live or die on the ability to verify that a forest being paid to exist actually still exists.

The Investor’s-Eye View

So why should capital flow here rather than into the hundredth imaging startup targeting North American row crops? A few reasons worth your diligence.

First, these markets are under-competed relative to their size. The imaging industry has historically over-indexed on North America and Europe, partly out of familiarity and partly because that’s where the early customers were. That leaves genuine white space in regions with hundreds of millions of people and massive resource economies.

Second, the willingness to pay is real and rising. Governments in both regions are investing in their own space capabilities and data infrastructure. Agribusiness is sophisticated and commercially motivated. Insurers and lenders have hard financial reasons to buy. This is not a market that runs purely on grant money and good intentions.

Third, and less comfortably, there are real challenges you should price in honestly. Payment reliability varies. Regulatory environments differ wildly from country to country. Data sovereignty concerns are rising, meaning some governments will want data stored and processed locally. Local partnerships often aren’t optional—they’re the difference between a signed contract and a polite meeting that goes nowhere. The founders who win here will be the ones who treat these regions as sophisticated markets requiring local presence and genuine relationships, not as pins on a global expansion map.

The Founder’s To-Do List

If you’re building in this space, a few unglamorous truths. Raw imagery is increasingly a commodity; the value lives in the analytics layer that turns pixels into decisions someone will pay for. Nobody buys a satellite image—they buy the answer to “is my crop okay,” “did the flood reach my warehouse,” “is that construction project on schedule,” or “should I approve this loan.” Build for the answer.

Localization is not a marketing afterthought. It’s language, it’s local agronomic and disaster context, it’s understanding that a solution built for Iowa will not automatically work for a Mindanao rice farmer or a Mato Grosso soy operation. And distribution through local partners, cooperatives, insurers, and government agencies usually beats trying to sell direct to end users who’ve never heard of your startup.

Conclusion: The Best Seat Is Facing Down

Space is having a moment, and most of the attention goes to launch, to constellations, to the race to put ever more hardware in orbit. That’s the supply side. But the businesses that will quietly print money are the ones on the demand side—the ones that take all that expensive orbital infrastructure and turn it into something a farmer in Luzon, a port operator in Santos, a developer in Cebu, or a lender in Bogotá will pay for every month.

Southeast Asia and Latin America offer exactly that: enormous, dynamic, under-mapped regions where knowing what’s happening on the ground is worth real money, and where the ground is often too big, too remote, or too cloudy to check any other way. The technology has matured, the costs have dropped, the regulatory winds are favorable, and the competition hasn’t fully arrived yet.

So by all means, keep looking up at the rockets—they’re magnificent. But if you want to build a business, the best view in the whole industry might just be the one pointed straight back down at Earth.

Vicente Diño is the writer and publisher behind Galleon Space — a newsletter covering the space economy in Southeast Asia and Latin America | @GalleonSpace

It is in the paddy fields of the Mekong Delta. In the fishing villages of the Philippine archipelago. In the highland farms of the Colombian Andes. In the industrial corridors of Malaysia and the startup neighborhoods of Buenos Aires.

The technology that will unlock it is one that most investors in the developing world have barely noticed yet.

Space technology.

A $626 Billion Market Pointed in the Wrong Direction

The global space economy reached $626 billion in 2025 and is on track to exceed $1.8 trillion by 2035. These numbers command serious attention from anyone who deploys capital into technology markets.

And yet the pattern of investment is almost comically concentrated. The United States and Europe account for the overwhelming majority of space venture capital — with Silicon Valley, Seattle, and London acting as the gravitational centers around which almost all capital orbits. This concentration is understandable. The US and Europe built the foundational infrastructure. They have the launch facilities, the regulatory frameworks, and the decades of accumulated technical expertise.

But the markets that space technology serves best — and should serve most urgently — are not in Houston or Paris. They are in Southeast Asia and Latin America. And almost no one is investing there.

Five Factors That Define the Opportunity

1. The Problems Are Bigger Here

Every investment thesis starts with a problem. By this measure, Southeast Asia and Latin America are not emerging markets for the space economy. They are its primary markets.

Agriculture. Southeast Asia has over 150 million smallholder farmers making planting, irrigation, and harvest decisions without access to weather forecasting, soil analysis, or crop disease detection. Yields in regional rice farming run 40 to 60 percent below achievable potential. The satellite technology to close that gap — multispectral imaging, crop health monitoring, precision advisory services — exists. The companies deploying it at scale do not yet.

Maritime. The Philippines is an archipelago of 7,641 islands, Indonesia of 17,000. Illegal fishing costs the region an estimated $10 billion annually. Satellite systems to monitor these waters exist. Companies deploying them affordably to underfunded coast guards and smallholder fishing communities largely do not.

Disaster resilience. Southeast Asia sits in the Pacific Ring of Fire and the world’s most active typhoon corridor. Satellite-based early warning systems, damage assessment, and disaster response coordination could save tens of thousands of lives annually and reduce economic losses currently running into hundreds of billions of dollars. Latin America faces equivalent exposure: Andean seismicity, Amazon-scale flooding, and climate-driven agricultural disruption at a scale that demands planetary-level monitoring.

Connectivity. Improved internet coverage across ASEAN could unlock over USD $40 billion in annual economic benefits. Strategic deployment of non-geostationary satellite systems could reduce broadband deployment costs by at least USD $15 billion while supporting gains in road logistics and disaster resilience. Over 200 million Latin Americans remain unconnected — the majority in areas that terrestrial networks will never profitably serve.

Infrastructure and real estate monitoring. Southeast Asia and Latin America are executing one of the largest infrastructure build-outs in human history. The Asian Development Bank projects USD $7.1 trillion in annual Asian infrastructure investment over 20 years. Latin America needs to invest approximately $2.2 trillion by 2030 to meet its Sustainable Development Goals. The problem is not capital. The problem is oversight.

Ghost projects — officially funded but never built, or declared complete when they are not — are endemic across both regions. In the Philippines, ghost projects have been associated with pork barrel scams and misused development funds. Across Latin America, cost overruns and delays consume 35 percent of total public infrastructure investment, equivalent to 0.65 percent of regional GDP annually. Satellite monitoring and remote sensing enables independent verification of physical construction progress without reliance on contractor self-reporting. A contractor whose reported progress will be cross-checked against satellite imagery before disbursement faces a fundamentally different incentive structure. The World Bank, ADB, and Inter-American Development Bank collectively disburse hundreds of billions annually into regional infrastructure. Every one of these institutions has an explicit fiduciary obligation to verify that the projects they fund are actually being built. Satellite-based construction intelligence is not a nice-to-have for these institutions. It is a fiduciary necessity.

Logistics and supply chain. The Southeast Asia logistics market reached USD $211.5 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach USD $349 billion by 2033. Latin America’s logistics market reached $360 billion in 2024, growing at 6.6% annually. Combined, these represent a $571 billion market growing toward $1 trillion — plagued by failures that satellite intelligence is uniquely positioned to solve.

Container dwell times at major ports like Jakarta’s Tanjung Priok and Manila’s ports stretched to 7 to 14 days in 2024, against a three to five day global benchmark, inflating working capital by USD $150 to $250 million region-wide. Real-time AIS vessel tracking and port congestion monitoring reduces these costs by giving supply chain managers accurate visibility rather than scheduled arrivals. The region’s vulnerability to typhoons and monsoons compounds the problem: real-time radar imaging can identify storms up to 7 to 10 days in advance, allowing alternative routing strategies before cargo is committed to disrupted corridors.

Cold chain integrity is an equally acute dimension. The Asia Pacific cold chain logistics market is growing at a CAGR of 13.87% through 2033, driven by expanding vaccine distribution networks and rising temperature-sensitive pharmaceutical demand. In remote island provinces of the Philippines and Indonesia, and across Andean routes in Colombia and Peru, terrestrial IoT coverage is too patchy for unbroken cold chain monitoring. Satellite-connected sensors provide continuous environmental records regardless of geography — simultaneously an operational tool for the logistics operator and a compliance document for the regulator.

The nearshoring revolution adds structural momentum. USD $239 billion in manufacturing FDI during 2024 spread production across Vietnam, Thailand, and Indonesia, creating multi-country inventory pools of unprecedented complexity. Mexico is experiencing the same phenomenon as US companies restructure away from Chinese manufacturing. The satellite-powered logistics intelligence platform that serves this complexity is not competing with global enterprise software — it is filling a void that global enterprise software cannot fill at developing world price points.

The global satellite supply chain monitoring market was valued at $3.2 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $11.8 billion by 2034 at 14.8% CAGR. The developing world opportunity is structurally larger than these figures suggest, because the real market is not the enterprise multinationals who already have sophisticated supply chain technology — it is the regional mid-market operators in Cebu, Surabaya, Medellin, and Ho Chi Minh City who currently manage complex supply chains with a combination of spreadsheets and WhatsApp messages, and who cannot afford the enterprise pricing of platforms built for Maersk and DHL.

The aggregate opportunity across all these problem domains is captured in a single data point: space technology has the potential to unlock US$100 billion in economic value contribution across Southeast Asia alone between 2023 and 2030, with agriculture, mining, and industrial sectors accounting for nearly 80% of that figure.

For context: the entire Southeast Asian venture capital market in 2024 was $2.8 billion. The opportunity is approximately 36 times larger than the capital available to pursue it.

2. Building Here Costs a Fraction of Building There

Space economy startups at the application layer — processing satellite data into agricultural insights, maritime intelligence, infrastructure monitoring, logistics visibility — are fundamentally software and data businesses. Their primary cost is talent.

A senior data scientist in San Francisco commands $180,000 to $250,000 per year in total compensation. The equivalent in Manila runs approximately $21,000 to $32,000. A remote sensing specialist in Munich earns €70,000 to €100,000. Their counterpart in Jakarta earns roughly $15,000 to $25,000.

This is an 8 to 10 times cost differential on the most critical talent category.

The implications are direct. A Philippine space economy startup with $500,000 in seed funding can build the team and achieve the operational milestones that a comparable US startup would need $3 to 4 million to replicate. The runway is longer. The time to product-market fit is extended. And the ability to serve developing world price points — governments and enterprises that cannot pay San Francisco rates — is structurally embedded in the business model from day one.

The underlying data infrastructure compounds this advantage. Sentinel-2 satellite imagery at 10-meter resolution with five-day revisit frequency is completely free from the European Space Agency. The full Copernicus archive is publicly available. AIS vessel tracking data — the backbone of maritime and logistics intelligence — is available free from public sources. A Southeast Asian or Latin American startup building on this data has input costs approaching zero for its core raw material. Its US or European counterpart is paying premium salaries, competing for constrained satellite imagery allocations, and serving enterprise customers whose procurement cycles are longer and more complex.

The developing world startup is not resource-constrained relative to its market. It is structurally advantaged.

3. Governments Are Pulling the Market Forward

The Philippines enacted a comprehensive Space Act in 2019 — the only country in Southeast Asia to have done so — establishing a legal framework explicitly designed to encourage commercial space activity. PhilSA functions as a development-oriented regulator, actively seeking private sector partners to build commercial applications on top of government satellite capability.

Indonesia has plans to deploy 18 imaging satellites in 2025 alone. Thailand’s National Space Master Plan targets global space innovation hub status by 2043, with over 35,000 enterprises already engaged with space-related solutions. By 2033, Asia’s share of the Earth observation market is expected to rise to 23%, fueled by sovereign EO initiatives across Southeast Asia.

In Latin America, ALCE — the regional space agency formally constituted in October 2024 with 18 member states and an annual budget of $100 million — represents the institutional architecture of a generation. Brazil’s domestic launch vehicle program, targeting first launch in 2026 from Alcântara at 2.3°S latitude, anchors the region’s sovereign ambition in commercial reality.

Government commitment at this scale does something specific and valuable for early-stage investors: it de-risks the market and anchors deal flow. A startup can point to PhilSA or BRIN as a potential first customer before a single dollar of venture capital is raised.

4. The Market Size and Growth Trajectory Are Exceptional

The Asia-Pacific region is the fastest-growing space economy globally, at a CAGR exceeding 10%. Asia-Pacific will grow from 18% of the global space market in 2026 to 28% by 2036. Southeast Asia — sitting within this trajectory and largely uncaptured by Chinese and Indian players — represents the open market within the fastest-growing regional space economy on Earth.

The Asia-Pacific small satellite market is projected to reach USD $34.11 billion by 2030, growing at 13.89% annually. Satellite internet operators in the region are generating over USD $1 billion in revenue in 2024, growing at 50.2% per year through 2030.

Latin America’s space economy stands at $19 billion in 2026, on a trajectory to $61 billion by 2036. A market growing more than three times in ten years, in a region where domestic space investment is minimal, represents a textbook asymmetric opportunity.

The logistics overlay transforms these figures. McKinsey projects $106 trillion in global infrastructure investment to 2040, with Asia accounting for $70 trillion of that total. Even marginal penetration of the satellite intelligence layer across this investment pipeline represents a multi-billion dollar addressable market built on top of free data and locally competitive cost structures.

5. The Equatorial Geography Nobody Prices In

Southeast Asia and Latin America possess a physics-based structural advantage in the space economy that investors have almost entirely overlooked.

The Earth rotates fastest at the equator — approximately 1,670 kilometers per hour. Every rocket launched from equatorial geography gets that velocity as a free contribution toward the 28,000 kilometers per hour required for low Earth orbit. Less fuel means more payload, lower costs, and higher commercial competitiveness. This is precisely why France operates its primary launch facility in French Guiana at 5.2°N latitude rather than from metropolitan France.

The Philippines’ southern islands sit at approximately 5°N. Indonesia’s proposed Biak spaceport is at 1°S. Brazil’s Alcântara Space Center, targeting first commercial launch in 2026, is at 2.3°S. Southeast Asia and Latin America collectively possess some of the finest launch geography on Earth — an advantage that no amount of capital can replicate at higher latitudes, and that remains almost entirely unexploited commercially.

The Capital Gap

Given these five factors, one would expect capital to be flooding into the developing world space economy. The opposite is true.

Southeast Asian VC funding in 2024 totaled US$2.8 billion across 420 funding rounds — a 59% decline from 2023 and the lowest level in six years. Space economy investment as a subset of this already-constrained market is negligible. Across Southeast Asia and Latin America combined, dedicated space economy venture funds are effectively nonexistent.

The two most prominent global space economy investors — Space Capital and Seraphim Space — deploy predominantly in the US and European markets. Development finance institutions with developing world technology mandates are beginning to engage with space economy opportunities but lack the specialized expertise to underwrite them with confidence.

This gap is not explained by a lack of opportunity. It is explained by a structural mismatch between where investment expertise sits — predominantly in the US and Europe — and where the most urgent and scalable space economy problems are concentrated. The space investors cannot see the developing world from where they sit. The emerging market investors lack the frameworks to evaluate deep tech in this domain.

The condition that results — a large, growing, well-evidenced opportunity sitting below the radar of virtually all organized capital — is precisely the condition that generates the most durable early-stage investment returns.

The Existence Proof

This thesis is not speculative. Satellogic, founded in Argentina and listed on NASDAQ with backing from SoftBank, built a globally competitive satellite imagery company from Buenos Aires that now serves governments and enterprises across Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. It is the existence proof that world-class space economy companies can be built from developing world foundations.

In Southeast Asia: Singapore’s Aliena raised a $5.6 million Series A in 2024 with satellite propulsion systems in orbit. NuSpace provides IoT nanosatellite connectivity across the region’s remote areas. Transcelestial raised $9.6 million from Airbus Ventures and EDBI to deploy laser communications infrastructure. The Philippines’ Agila satellite — the country’s latest dedicated commercial communications satellite — launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 in December 2024, demonstrating that Philippine capital will move into space infrastructure when the enabling conditions exist.

These are not isolated exceptions. They are the early signal of a wave.

The Investment Thesis, Stated Plainly

The developing world is not behind the space economy. It is the space economy’s largest, most urgent, and most underfunded market. The problems that satellite technology solves best — agricultural productivity at smallholder scale, maritime surveillance across archipelagic geographies, disaster resilience in the world’s most exposed nations, connectivity for the globally unconnected, independent oversight of trillion-dollar infrastructure programs, and real-time supply chain intelligence across the world’s fastest-growing logistics corridors — are disproportionately concentrated in Southeast Asia and Latin America.

The cost structure to build solutions to these problems in these regions is 8 to 10 times lower than in the United States. The governments are building the institutional architecture to support commercial development. The market growth trajectories outpace global averages in every relevant segment. The underlying data is free. The geographic endowment is among the finest on Earth. And virtually no organized capital is paying attention.

The next space economy unicorn will not come from Silicon Valley.

It will come from a city in Southeast Asia or Latin America that the mainstream investment narrative has not yet found.

Vicente Diño is the writer and publisher behind Galleon Space — a newsletter covering the space economy in Southeast Asia and Latin America. | @GalleonSpace

Then it ended. And for the two centuries that followed, Southeast Asia and Latin America moved from the center of the global economy to its periphery.

We believe that is about to change again. And we believe the space economy is how it happens.

The new galleons are not wooden ships. They are rockets carrying satellites into orbit, orbital platforms manufacturing materials that are impossible to produce on Earth, AI systems processing planetary-scale data from the edge of space, and eventually — within the lifetimes of children alive today — human settlements beyond our planet. This new fleet is crossing the same distances, connecting the same civilizations, and carrying something more valuable than spices, silk, or silver: the data, connectivity, intelligence, and resources that will define the economy of the 21^st century.

Galleon Space exists to cover this story — and to ensure it ends differently from the first time.

What We Will Cover

Galleon Space is the authoritative English-language newsletter covering the full space economy in Southeast Asia and Latin America — from launch vehicles and satellite infrastructure to the applications built on space data, to the frontier industries that will define the next century. Every two weeks, we will publish deeply researched, analytically rigorous essays on:

▪ Launch vehicles and infrastructure — the private launch companies emerging across the developing world, the equatorial geography that gives Southeast Asia and Latin America a physics-based advantage over higher-latitude launch sites, and the regional infrastructure being built to support the next generation of small satellite deployment.

▪ Satellites and Earth observation — the constellations monitoring our oceans, forests, farms, cities, industrial infrastructure and the founders building the data platforms and analytics layers that turn raw satellite imagery into decisions that save lives, grow food, and build economies.

▪ Space manufacturing — the emerging industry of producing materials in the microgravity, vacuum, and extreme-temperature environment of space that cannot be replicated on Earth — from pharmaceutical crystals and ultra-pure fiber optics to exotic semiconductors — and how developing world operators can participate in the global supply chain.

▪ Space mining and resource extraction — the near-term commercial reality of asteroid and lunar water and mineral extraction, the long-term potential of metals from near-Earth asteroids, and — critically — what the rise of space mining means for developing world economies whose government revenues depend on the terrestrial extraction of the same materials.

▪ AI and compute in space — the convergence of artificial intelligence with space infrastructure: satellite data processed by machine learning, onboard AI enabling autonomous spacecraft decisions, and the emerging concept of orbital AI compute nodes that process data at the edge of space.

▪ Space-enabled connectivity — the LEO satellite constellation revolution bringing high-speed internet to the remote islands, highland communities, and maritime zones that terrestrial networks will never serve, and what universal connectivity means for economic inclusion across the developing world.

▪ Space tourism and the commercial space station era — as the ISS era closes and commercial stations open for business, the ground support, managed services, and supply chain opportunities that developing world technology companies are positioned to capture.

▪ Investment and venture capital — who is funding the developing world space economy, where the gaps are, and why the most significant untapped investment opportunity in global technology is hiding in plain sight.

▪ Research and development — the university laboratories, government research programs, and technical institutions that are building the foundational science and engineering capability of the next generation of space economy companies.

▪ Policy and ecosystem — the space agencies, regulatory frameworks, international partnerships, and government programs shaping whether the developing world captures its fair share of the space economy it is enabling.

▪ People and community — the scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, and policymakers in the developing world who are building this ecosystem from the inside, one company, one breakthrough, and one policy at a time.

The Thesis

Here is the argument we are making — and will spend years proving:

The nations of Southeast Asia and Latin America are not behind the space economy. They are the space economy’s largest, most urgent, and most underfunded market.

Every segment of the space economy maps onto a regional need of extraordinary scale and urgency:

Rockets and launch infrastructure? Southeast Asia and Latin America have the world’s best equatorial launch geography — yet almost no domestic launch capability. The physics advantage is real, proven, and almost entirely unexploited.

Satellite data and Earth observation? The problems that satellite intelligence solves best — agricultural monitoring across millions of smallholder farms, maritime domain awareness across archipelagic waters, infrastructure assessment across territories too vast to physically inspect — are an order of magnitude more acute in Southeast Asia and Latin America than anywhere in the OECD.

Space manufacturing and mining? The countries of Southeast Asia and Latin America are some of the world’s most significant terrestrial mining nations, with centuries-old expertise in mineral extraction and processing. That expertise translates directly into the emerging field of space resource extraction — but only if their engineers are part of the conversation that is happening right now, largely without them.

AI in space? Southeast Asia and Latin America are generating the largest and fastest-growing volumes of Earth observation data on the planet. The AI models that make sense of that data should be trained on it, by people who understand it, building for the national communities they represent.

Connectivity from space? 150 million people in Southeast Asia and another 150 million people in Latin America remain unconnected to the global internet. LEO satellite constellations are the only realistic path to closing that gap. The opportunity to build the service layer, the integration infrastructure, and the managed connectivity services on top of this constellation infrastructure to deliver communication services to the region is enormous — and largely uncaptured.

The cost structure advantages of building space economy companies across these regions mean that Southeast Asian and Latin American startups can reach profitability faster, serve lower price points commercially, and survive longer on less capital than their Western counterparts.

And the capital gap is extraordinary. Almost no venture capital is explicitly focused on space economy startups from Southeast Asia and Latin America. The market opportunity is vast. The founders are building. The funding is nearly absent.

That gap is real. Galleon Space is here to document how — and to help close it.

The Civilizational Argument

There is a deeper argument beneath the investment thesis — and we want to be honest about it from the beginning.

In the first Age of Exploration, the nations of Southeast Asia and Latin America were the objects and oftentimes victims of European expansion. Their resources were extracted. Their wealth flowed outward. Their civilizations were disrupted. The Galleon Trade that made Manila and Acapulco the hubs of the first global network enriched Spain for two and a half centuries. The Philippines and the rest of Southeast Asia and Latin America did not benefit in proportion to their geographic centrality.

We are living through a new age of exploration and economic expansion. And a similar pattern is already visible: satellite data companies based in San Francisco and London that sell developing world data back to developing world governments. Launch companies that charge per kilogram to put Philippine satellites into orbit from facilities in California. The intellectual property and economic value of the space economy are concentrating in the same countries that concentrated the value of the first age of exploration.

And in the longer term — space mining threatens to do to developing world terrestrial mineral economies what the age of exploration did to indigenous trade networks: disrupt them from the outside, for the benefit of those with the technology and capital to act first.

Galleon Space exists because we believe this new age of exploration must end differently.

Southeast Asia and Latin America will not be the objects of the new space economy. They will not be spectators, customers, or afterthoughts. They will be architects — building the rockets, the satellites, the orbital platforms, the mining systems, the AI infrastructure, and the companies that serve their own national communities and generate economic value in and for the region.

That is not a hope. It is already happening. We are here to cover it.

About the Author

Vicente Diño is the writer and publisher behind Galleon Space.

Vicente brings more than 3 decades of experience building and scaling global enterprise software and services organizations. He holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of the Philippines.

His goal for this newsletter: to help accelerate the developing world’s full participation in the emerging space economy - by promoting space tech startups across Southeast Asia and Latin America, and by telling the stories of the scientists and engineers in the region who are making a difference in the global advance of space science and technology.