2025 The Year From Space

The biggest stories of 2025 told through awe-inspiring satellite images, revealing the secrets behind the headlines

In 2025, satellites captured wildfires devastating the Hollywood Hills, battlefronts being redrawn in Ukraine, and six hundred million people gathering for a sacred festival on the River Ganges. From space, images revealed the scale of the millions displaced in Gaza. Spy satellites tracked the clandestine movements of arms from North Korea to Russia. And scientists have counted wildebeest and walrus to keep tabs on the health of our planet. We have even witnessed SpaceX launch a rocket, looking back from space.

High above Earth, thousands of satellites silently capture millions of images every single day. From this extraordinary vantage point, they reveal the beauty, drama, and fragility of our planet like never before. 2025 The Year from Space takes you on a breathtaking journey through a year of astonishing events seen from space.

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2025 begins with an inferno: satellites detect the first sparks that ignite Los Angeles and then track wildfires tear through the homes of film stars and ordinary people alike. In Africa, the Great Migration surges – a living river of wildebeest sweeping across the plains all counted with precision by AI.

But these eyes in the sky see more than wonder – they uncover dark secrets. Spy satellites meticulously trace millions of artillery shells from North Korea to Russia and see into the heart of Sudan’s bitter civil war to uncover hidden horrors. Shadows cast across the Earth by human conflict.

And yet, amid the darkness, there is light. It’s impossible not to love the mighty walrus and this year citizen scientists unite across continents, scouring satellite images to find walrus colonies in the frozen Arctic – a testament to hope and resilience. Nature, too, writes its own epic poetry: snow falling on the arid Atacama Desert, blazing volcanoes devouring whole towns and Hurricane Melissa spinning its menacing path across the Caribbean before striking Jamaica with devastating force.

As the year closes, the skies dance with auroras and we look down on rivers freezing into silver ribbons, while a town in Italy transforms a mountain into a Christmas tree so vast it shimmers like a beacon shining out into space.

These are the stories that defined our year, told from the only perspective that reveals their magnitude and the truth behind the headlines. Unpacked through news archive, witness testimony, user-generated material, and expert analysis – this is the unseen story of our year on Earth.