CubeSats have made near Earth orbit much less expensive for companies and universities. Caltech sponosred a workshop a few months ago - here is one of the CubeSat gurus speaking on what they did and why it worked.
NASA has a program designed to make the process of building a microsatellite about an order of magnitude less expensive - the PhoneSat. One can imagine dedicated groups of amateurs getting invovled (arguably they have been for a few decades with Amateur Radio satellites)
This sort of tech could be used for Earth bound monitoring projects that don't involve orbiting payloads. Modified versions could be used with autonomous drones for environmental monitoring for example ...
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