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Comment by panarky | Hacker News Reader

Starlink is seeking approval for tens of thousands of low-earth-orbit satellites. Each one will have high-bandwidth network connections. It doesn't seem intractable to put cameras on each one and stitch their feeds together for imagery that's maximum 30 minutes old for any arbitrary point on the globe.

And the market for near-real-time imagery might be even larger than the market for internet connectivity.

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This is more or less the business model of Planet [0], which is imaging the whole Earth every day with around 200 satellites. (No affiliation, but I previously worked for a different smallsat company.) It would be possible to get a higher visitation than that with more satellites, but it may not be cost-effective (e.g. someone might be willing to pay $X for a subscription to daily images, but not $(48*X) for half-hour images).

I also doubt you could just slap a camera on Starlink satellites. Even ignoring payload size/weight, power consumption, etc, you're typically fighting 3 different constraints when you decide which way to rotate your satellite (sun exposure for power, antenna direction for high-bandwidth network, payload direction if you have cameras or other directional sensors). They're not going to want to try to deal with that for the first iteration of their fleet.

[0] https://www.planet.com/products/planet-imagery/

I can’t help but be excited by the possibilities of tech like Planet, so many interesting applications for their data.

Excited? Maybe I’m just getting old but it terrifies me.

Agreed, and the terrifying use-cases aren't hypothetical, they're the raison d'etre. There are some good "plowshares" type projects out there, but I'm not sure those ends justify the original and ongoing ones

The next generation of LEO ground imaging satellites will be significantly larger than Starlink units.

Now, with the resolution relaxation from the United States Government that went into effect on February 21, 2015, you have access to an even clearer view of the ground with 30-centimeter resolution commercial satellite imagery.

https://spacenews.com/a-detailed-view-of-the-ground-with-30-...

WorldView-3 is the industry’s first multi-payload, super-spectral, highresolution commercial satellite. Operating at an altitude of 617 km, WorldView-3 provides 31 cm panchromatic resolution, 1.24 m multispectral resolution, 3.7 m short-wave infrared resolution, and 30 m CAVIS resolution. WorldView-3 has an average revisit time of less than one day and is capable of collecting up to 680,000 sq km per day, further enhancing the Maxar collection capacity for more rapid and reliable collection.

https://www.maxar.com/constellation

WorldView-3: Mass: 2800 kg (6200 lbs) Power: 3.1 kW solar array, Altitude: 617 km

Starlink: Mass: v 1.0: 260 kg (573 lb) Power: 6 kW solar array, Altitude: 550 km

https://lilibots.blogspot.com/2020/04/starlink-satellite-dim...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink#Constellation_design_...

There is a huge difference between a comms relay sat (basically a transponder, a battery, and solar panels ) and an imaging satellite , which needs a huge collector mirror that coats O(billions) to polish.

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