Comment: Did you check the weather this morning? Use Google Maps to get somewhere? Watch television, take public transport, or rely on mobile coverage outside a city? If so, you may already have used services that depend, in one way or another, on satellite systems in orbit, but none of which New Zealand owns.
We don’t tend to think of ourselves as users of satellites. Satellites can feel distant, technical, and far removed from everyday life. But satellite data is built into ordinary services we use all the time. The satellite layer is there, it’s just buried underneath the final product.
Before going further, it helps to understand what satellites do. “Satellite” is not a single kind of system. Some orbit closer to Earth and are well-suited to imaging and observation. Some sit further out and are better suited to communications or continuous monitoring over a fixed area. Others sit in medium orbits and provide the positioning and timing services behind navigation. While some satellite systems are a single spacecraft, others are constellations: networks of multiple satellites working together. Some constellations consist of dozens of satellites, while others contain thousands and are known as mega-constellations.
In practice, that means different satellites are doing different kinds of work simultaneously. Navigation satellites help with location and timing. Weather and Earth observation satellites monitor storms, land, oceans, and environmental change. Communications satellites relay signals for broadcasting, internet, and connectivity. Together, those systems support a broad set of activities on the ground, from disaster response and public safety to military operations, trade and transport, and even financial transactions that rely on precise timing.
Your relationship with satellites depends on who you are and what you do. For an average New Zealander, it’s involved when we’re checking the weather, making a call, or listening to the radio. For a student in Canterbury, it’s involved when they use public transport and watch television. For a sheep farmer on the West Coast, it’s used for smart farming, environmental monitoring, and hazard management. A Wellington naval officer may rely on satellite systems for search and rescue, ocean monitoring, and intelligence. The service on the ground feels ordinary enough. What is less visible is the connection to space behind it.
When you check the weather, you may be relying on Japan’s Himawari 9 satellite. When you navigate, you’ll be relying on the US Global Positioning System, run by the United States Space Force. When you connect in rural areas, you may be using Starlink, a satellite internet network from SpaceX. And when broadcast signals reach homes across the country, they may travel through satellite infrastructure operated by Australia’s Optus satellite network, which is owned by Singapore-based Singtel. We call this the “satellite data chain” – the invisible pathway connecting a person to the satellite systems, operators, and services behind an everyday activity. People see the map on their phone, not the positioning system behind it. They see the forecast, not the satellite data feeding into it. Despite satellites underpinning such a large share of the global economy, almost no research had examined this from the perspective of the ordinary person using these services. Studies had catalogued satellite services and mapped their economic value, but none had built a framework showing the full chain from individual to satellite. In New Zealand specifically, public understanding of the country’s relationship with satellite data was severely limited. That was the gap our research set out to fill.
We mapped New Zealand’s satellite data ecosystem: the services available to New Zealanders and the systems behind them. We identified 23 satellite-enabled services, delivered by 43 active satellite service providers and supported by 36 active satellite systems, amounting to 8162 active satellites at the time of research. In other words, the everyday services used by New Zealand alone depend on thousands of satellites and dozens of providers working invisibly in the background.
The most significant finding in our research was that New Zealand is completely dependent on international operators and systems for all our satellite services. Every single one.
That makes New Zealand a useful case study. By tracing the chain from everyday services back to the satellite systems behind them, we demonstrated just how integrated satellites are into ordinary life, and how international the infrastructure behind that life has become. Many of the services we use every day rely on satellite systems owned and operated well beyond our national control, and that dependence is only becoming more embedded over time.
We need to talk about this. When satellites make the news, it’s usually about launches, defence, or the latest move in the commercial space race. Much less attention is paid to how satellite services actually reach us on the ground, how dependent ordinary life has become on systems that are difficult to see, and what happens if access is disrupted. New Zealand designates sectors such as telecommunications, financial systems, and emergency management as critical infrastructure, and many of these already depend on satellites we don’t own and cannot protect.
In protecting our critical infrastructure, are we accounting for the fact that the layer underneath it is in space, and controlled by someone (and somewhere) else? And if that layer is disrupted, what can we do about it?
The question isn’t whether we depend on satellites. We know we do. It’s whether we understand that dependence well enough to start asking the harder questions about resilience, governance, and risk.
The US, and other major spacepower countries, are already grappling with their dependence on satellites and the need to protect and defend their assets in space. New Zealand sits further back, with no assets in space of our own. We are not only relying on other countries’ satellites for data, but on their ability to protect them too. Should access be disrupted, are we prepared to function without it?
