Celebrating the triumphs of two pioneering women is one thing. Building an organic ecosystem for a fully commercialized space economy is another.

Hong Kong astronaut Lai Ka-ying and space scientist Su Hui have already made history, showcasing the city’s multipronged ambitions in orbit, something “otherworldly” for the business circle.

READ MORE: HK's Lai, crewmates reach 60-day orbital mark with experiments

The next step, however, is nothing but “earthly” — creating the institutional infrastructure that can turn a historic moment into a durable industry that harvests predictable and tangible results.

The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region has for years courted rocket-makers and satellite manufacturers. The more consequential business, though, may be happening after launch — in what gets done with the data once a satellite or payload is in orbit.

Data’s ‘earthly’ commercial pull

Executive Council Convenor Regina Ip Lau Suk-yee, one of the most prominent advocates for Hong Kong’s fledgling space sector, says she believes the SAR is well placed to “make good use of satellite data for commercial applications, including monitoring emissions and disasters”.

At last week’s 2026 Greater Bay Area Conference, co-organized by China Daily and the Hong Kong Coalition, she put it bluntly: “There are lots of commercial opportunities for Hong Kong. We’re just at the right place and at the right time.”

Ip is spot-on: Hong Kong is moving to convert orbital data into earthly use. According to reliable sources, The Hong Kong and China Gas Co Ltd is ready to monitor emissions using readings from a camera already in orbit, referred to by Quentin Parker, a space scientist at the University of Hong Kong, as “low-hanging fruit”.

Stellerus Tech, an artificial-intelligence meteorological startup that Su founded, plans to work with Towngas to check for gas leaks across Hong Kong using data from the Multi-Spectral Imaging Carbon Observatory (MUSICO) — the payload Su developed and Lai helped to install in the Tiangong space station.

MUSICO, nicknamed the “space eye”, reached Tiangong (“palace in space” in Mandarin) in May as the first Hong Kong-developed science payload to fly aboard the nation’s orbiting laboratory for monitoring greenhouse gas and resolving emission sources to a 100-meter grid. Its developers say MUSICO is precise enough to tell one power plant or landfill from another, a level of detail no comparable orbital system currently matches.

That precision has also caught the eye of Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing (HKEX) which runs the city’s bourse.

Su, who is a professor at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, having spent 17 years with the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration before returning to the SAR, says a unit within HKEX that builds carbon-trading infrastructure has approached her team about feeding MUSICO’s readings into its platform — a space-verified benchmark for a market that has long struggled with the credibility of self-reported carbon dioxide emissions data that are otherwise “unrealistic” to check and audit, according to Yvonne Kam, a PwC China partner and also deputy chairman of the Hong Kong Institute of Certified Public Accountants’ Sustainability Disclosure Standards Committee.

Nothing has been signed so far. But the interest itself is instructive. A payload designed to serve China’s 2030 emissions-peak target is spurring commercial demand before its first full dataset is even published officially.

Infrastructure gap

“Hong Kong needs more receiving stations for space data,” says lawmaker Duncan Chiu, who represents the technology and innovation functional constituency and is president of the Hong Kong Information Technology Joint Council.

He told the 2026 GBA conference that Hong Kong requires more space infrastructure generally, such as additional ground stations for receiving and processing data, including, but not limited to, satellite transmissions.

The commercial logic for locating that infrastructure is straightforward, and prices for data centers are already rising on the back of growing demand from the Chinese mainland side of the 11-city Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, says Conduit Capital Partners Managing Director Christian Liedtke, who has spent years leasing warehouse and data-center properties in Europe.

“There’s a technical appeal to having modern data-center infrastructure close to where you actually operate since it cuts down on latency,” he says, calling Hong Kong an “ideal place” for data centers.

The demand for that capacity is already building up from two directions. Mainland AI startups and technology firms have been pushing for data centers in Hong Kong, along with satellites in low earth orbit adding a second, steadier stream.

HKUST and the Chinese University of Hong Kong have launched four remote-sensing satellites between them, and five local universities now run active space projects, each generating data that has to be received, processed and, eventually, sold.

What both streams depend on is Hong Kong’s ability to process, price and move data across borders in ways many platforms can’t easily replicate — a function of the city’s common law system, open capital account, close geographical proximity to the mainland, and its status as a hub for cross-border data (with certain tax exemptions in the Northern Metropolis).

ALSO READ: HK's superconnector role highlighted at major GBA conference

That’s also the thesis now shaping policy discussions in Hong Kong. Officials say a government-commissioned panel of experts from the technology, finance and data fields is studying how Hong Kong could build a functioning data-trading ecosystem covering pricing mechanisms, data-format standardization and security safeguards. Recommendations are expected to be presented during the current fiscal year.

However, cross-border data transfer remains the constraint on how fast that ecosystem can be created and monetized. “We can’t localize the AI models we need to serve the market because of the current restrictive data access on both sides of the boundary within the Greater Bay Area,” says an operator in the Northern Metropolis who requested anonymity and is now involved with a data center project in the Hetao Shenzhen-Hong Kong Science and Technology Innovation Co-operation Zone.

That complaint points to a gap that Ip herself has been flagging for a year — the absence of a single coordinating body. She has been telling the HKSAR government to set up a dedicated space office, with recruitment for a head to begin within six months of its founding, along with a coordination committee spanning technology, law, finance and cross-border cooperation.

“Developing the space economy spans research and development, space technology, enacting new laws on registration of space assets, as well as funding financial, legal and professional services and regional and international cooperation,” Ip tells China Daily.

“So you need a coordinating office and an advisory committee — a space commission to consult, advise and help to coordinate.”