I don't know about Digital Globe's capabilities, but they are also in this business as are others.
Would 100 megapixels make a big difference in availability?
No. Everyone talks a big game about SAR and resolution because it’s easier than latency. People don’t pay for resolution, they pay for immediacy. (The folks who do pay for resolution typically have their own birds. There simply aren’t many use cases for occasionally needing hyper-resolution photos of what something looked like a few days or even hours ago.)
(That’s where the good “satellite” images in online maps come from.)
Even if the vessel can’t be boarded, high-res photographic evidence could be used to pursue legal action against the vessel’s owners.
This is the dorm delivery idea for space businesses. Everyone is working on it, including folks with no commercial ambitions, and the number of people willing to pay for it is small, and they’re cheap.
Right. The business model is sympathy money from big governments. Practically, that means re-selling to a government contractor. A contractor for whom this is an afterthought, and who has a million other providers to choose from, some of whom don’t need to make money.
> a good stick for beating up on China as they're one of the main offenders in IUU
The countries being harmed by this are in no position to beat up on China. The ones who can don’t care about it enough to make it a diplomatic priority.
A service with real time streams of those objects + GPS data info directly from starlink for a select sets locations should worth a lot for DOD, NATO, Ukraine. DOD and NATO would likely flip the bill for everything need to build such system.