Space, says Chris Newlands, has an image problem. Not the pictures it takes but the way it feels to everyone standing on the ground beneath it.
“Space feels cold, it feels distant,” the founder and CEO of Space Aye said in a recent interview with CNBC. “Our job, as we see it, is to personalize it, make it more useful, everyday useful.”
That mission has taken Newlands from military service to the boardrooms of financial services and now to the frontier of satellite technology, where his company is fusing real-time satellite imagery with data from the billions of connected devices already in people’s pockets, on their wrists, and inside their cars.
An Unlikely Flight Path
Newlands does not describe himself as someone who set out to become a space entrepreneur. “I don’t think I had the ambition to be a space entrepreneur,” he said. But the path, in hindsight, tracks. A military veteran, Newlands says that background has proven useful in an industry where the line between civilian and defense applications is often thin. “Space is very often dual use,” he noted.
From there, he spent roughly two decades as a chartered professional services executive, a stint he credits with easing his transition into space entrepreneurship. The combination of operational discipline from the military and financial rigour from professional services now underpins Space Aye. The result, he said, is a unique capability protected by the company’s patents that can “see and identify everything in the satellite image,” creating what Newlands calls “a digital handshake from space to Earth.”
Satellite Navigation That Sees Around the Corner
Pressed on why audiences beyond the space industry should pay attention, Newlands reaches for a scenario that feels closer to science fiction than software: a driver, three or four years from now, watching not just the road ahead on their satellite navigation but the vehicles on it, in real time.
He also points further out to a future in which drones and autonomous robots are tracked, and even controlled, from space: “the ability for drones in the distant future, not far from now, to see robots and autonomous drones and have the ability to control them from space,” he told Nadja Atwal on CNBC.
Underlying it all, Newlands argues, is scale. “We talk about living in the matrix now,” he said. “There are already tens of billions of IoT devices or digital or smart devices out there and sensors, and that ability to see where they are at any given time, that ability to measure and make better, more informed decisions is a real game changer.”
Space Aye’s near-term ambitions are more grounded, quite literally. Newlands zeroes in on shipping, freight, and logistics, a sector he pegs at roughly $8 trillion globally, as a primary target. Citing a World Economic Forum report in 2025, Space Aye’s approach to fusing live satellite and sensor data could add 35 percent to the bottom line across that industry, which is a figure he translates into roughly $2.8 trillion in added value – a figure which would exceed the entire economy of the United Kingdom. Those are Space Aye’s own projections rather than independently verified figures, but they illustrate the scale of the opportunity Newlands believes his company is chasing.
A Vote of Confidence From Google Earth’s Former Chief Geologist
Newlands points to a hire he made last year as external validation of that pitch: last year, Space Aye brought on the former chief geologist of Google Earth, who Newlands says told the team they’re “the biggest thing to hit the geospatial sector in the last ten years.” Newlands leans on that claim precisely because of who’s making it. “When someone who’s an expert since 2007 says that, it has a profound impact,” he said.
That confidence feeds into some sweeping language about Space Aye’s ambitions. “We’re about to change everything, and I mean genuinely everything from every sector, every thought process and business model you can consider,” Newlands said. “That intelligence, or that insight, that you get from space in real time will change the game forever.”
As for how big the addressable opportunity actually is, Newlands is quick to note that estimates vary widely depending on who you ask. “If you ask a hundred analysts how to invest money, they’ll give you different answers,” he said.
However, another joint World Economic Forum and McKinsey & Company report, published in April 2024 and titled “Space: The $1.8 Trillion Opportunity for Global Economic Growth,” projects the global space economy roughly tripling from about $630 billion today to $1.8 trillion by 2035 — growing nearly twice as fast as global GDP over that span.
Training Data for the Next Generation of AI
Newlands is betting that Space Aye’s relevance extends well beyond logistics and into the future of artificial intelligence itself. He argues that Large Language Models (LLMs) are approaching a ceiling on the quality of data available to train them, pointing to hallucinations and bias as symptoms of that shortage. “That ability to take real-time imagery and merge it with electronic data, real-time from space, could become the training data for the next artificial intelligence models,” he said. And the data he characterizes as “verified, deterministic, certain,” unlike material scraped from the open web. Newlands refers to this concept internally as a Large Terrestrial Model (LTM).
A Digital Twin on a Scottish Dairy Farm
Space Aye’s platform launched in January, and Newlands is candid that the company is still young. Its most concrete example so far is a partnership with the Scottish government to build a digital twin of a dairy farm. Using patents that cover location, biometrics, audio, video, and static imagery, the system monitors livestock remotely by tracking animal health, watching for signs of outbreaks such as foot-and-mouth disease, and aiming to increase yields.
Newlands frames the implications well beyond one farm in Scotland. Scaled globally, he argues, the same approach could help chip away at food poverty and support progress against broader sustainable development goals — an early, tangible test of the “everyday useful” version of space technology he’s trying to build.
What’s Next
For Newlands, the throughline across satnav, logistics, AI training data, and livestock monitoring is the same: satellites that can be automatically tasked to image any point on Earth, with the resulting data fused into insights people and businesses can actually act on. “That’s happening now,” he said.
Space Aye’s ambitious market projections may take years to test. But for a company still in its first year of live operation, Newlands is already framing the conversation less around what satellites can photograph and more around what that imagery, combined with everyday data, can help the world decide.
