The kit includes both some ready-to-use tools for making sense of satellite content as well as the code companies can use to craft their own tools.

It's easy to see concerns that NASA might downplay purely scientific uses of its data as a result. Still, this might be overdue. The earlier approach may have offered massive amounts of content (petabytes, NASA said), but there was no one repository where you could find everything you needed. This could encourage more use of that data for all purposes, not just for companies hoping to make a profit.