It’s a vision of a world in which low-cost satellites are carried on affordable rockets that launch when you want – all ordered at the click of a button with no need to wait for slow-moving government-funded space missions.

Yet this latest space race also presents its own challenges, says Terrabotics’ Gareth Morgan. The sheer volume of space imagery and data means that AI systems being used to automatically analyse it are having to catch up.

“Current AI systems need an extraordinary amount of ‘label training’ so they can then independently recognise different features on their own. We need a change in the way AI works. Progress is being made but it is very new.”

More information may generally be a good thing, but there are ethical considerations – after all, everyone is potentially being photographed from space every day.

And who has access to this data? As private satellites proliferate and the big data revolution advances, critics argue there needs to be a debate about public and private roles in space.

It’s a point that Planet Labs’ Will Marshall accepts.

“One of the things that’s important to us is that our imagery cannot see a person let alone recognise a person. Of course that doesn’t mean there are no negative implications.

“We as technologists have to be the best stewards we can of that data.”

Then there is space debris – there are already some 30,000 objects, large and small, in orbit: “Ultimately we will have to deal with that problem,” agrees Will Marshall.

“The industry will have to start bringing those things down and that’s not going to be an easy challenge.”

While the potential rewards for investors may be great, so are the risks. Rockets can blow up, fail to launch, or put satellites into the wrong orbit.

“Rockets aren’t the way you make money from space,” says Matt Perkins, who was for 10 years the chief executive of industry leader Surrey Satellites and is now head of Oxford University Innovation.

“The way you make money is in the downstream end - by using all this information coming from space. As this becomes cheaper that’s going to open up commercial opportunities – with data being used in ways that people haven’t yet thought of.”

As he says, there’s a whole range of data from space. In this new business frontier, it will be up to the ingenuity of humans to take commercial advantage of that.