Since the 1960's the Science & Engineering Research Council has been actively concerned with supporting the British Space Programme. One aspect of this support has been large scale data processing of data from artificial satellites; in particular satellites used for research in various fields of astronomy. In order to carry out this work considerable use has been made of large mainframe computers, specialist machines such as the AP 120B vector processor, and more recently some studies have been carried out associated with how the ICL DAP might support image processing aspects of the Space Programme. The paper will discuss several satellite projects including the British Ariel series, the International Ultraviolet Explorer (IUE), the Infra-Red Astronomical Satellite (IRAS) and the Voyager Planetary mission. Some details will be given of the image restoration techniques that were developed at Chilton, on an IBM 360/195 computer, to support the IUE project and indications will be given as to how this work might have been carried out had a truly parallel processing device, such as the ICL DAP been available at the time. The main theme of the talk will be the high degree of parallelism that exists in processing astronomical images.