An image from the Economist's Technology Quarterly. Interesting to me: I've been following the Space X (not to be confused with Force X) stuff with great interest. But I hadn't realised that launch was such a tiny fraction of the overall spend.
As a minor tie into the nominal subject of this blog, notice that meteorology is 3% of the satellites. That probably folds in climatology too.
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I imagine some climate relevant satellites are found in "Earth-observation" as well.
[Possible. But the associated articles talk about a lot of others things under "earth obs": crops, cars, etc -W]
I'm surprised too. I had thought the launch costs were quite a big part of the costs. I have, admittedly, never actually checked.
I thought cost of satellites and launch costs were roughly similar so 3* is more than I expected but not all that far off. That there is also costs for ground equipment and astronaut programs is obvious but not something I have really thought about. Initially surprised by how large ground equipment is but perhaps that includes every gps gadget and so on, therefore maybe not surprising in that case. I assume satellite services is mainly salaries and associated costs for marketing and selling the services the satellites provide. Perhaps not too surprising again because you are not going to pay for a launch and satellite unless sure costs can be recovered so sales and costs are likely to swamp launch and satellite cost.