The view from somewhere: What remote sensing still has to learn about the satellite gaze

Remote sensing (RS) has become indispensable for monitoring Earth’s processes and informing environmental and political decisions. Yet, despite a long history of critical scholarship pointing to its epistemological limits and political embeddedness, mainstream RS research and public representation continue to treat the technology as offering neutral and comprehensive insights into the planet. In this perspective paper, we revisit these critiques and argue that the celebratory narrative of RS persists and that the field has largely failed to integrate them into research practice, training, and institutional culture. We center our analysis on what we call the “satellite gaze”: a socio-technical perspective shaped by four interrelated dimensions: its positionality (“gaze from where”), its ownership (“whose gaze”), its production (“which gaze”), and its object (“gaze on what”). Drawing on feminist theory and Hannah Arendt’s reflections on space exploration, we show how RS fosters an illusion of objectivity and mastery that risks reinforcing rather than overcoming structural inequalities. Through case studies from our own work and existing literature, we illustrate how technical choices, image interpretation, institutional preferences, and global-scale ambitions shape what becomes visible, what is obscured, and who benefits. We conclude that the promise of RS should not lie in mirroring the Earth “as it is,” but in cultivating plurality by acknowledging its situated knowledge production, engaging with local expertise, and confronting the political dimensions of observation. Without such reflexivity, RS risks contributing to the very alienation and inequalities if often claims to overcome.