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Comment by 7ewis | Hacker News Reader

I zoomed in, was also disappointed. Don't know the use case for these photos, but when you compare it to the quality of say a drone photo, SkyFi is nowhere near as good.

I'm sure there must be a market for these photos, but for most people I think a drone is probably better and more cost effective.

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> but when you compare it to the quality of say a drone photo

Comparing a satellite/plane photo to a drone is apples to oranges.

There’s no way to scale a business in providing global drone level coverage.

Now there are services that fly planes with high res imagery that can get down to ~20cm. And even these business are super difficult to scale.

we have drone partnerships, airplane, stratospheric balloons, etc and are just STARTING with satellites. Drone imagery is better but a problem of scale but we are trying to solve that. Think of it not as photos but more so of data....we could never list the complete use cases here because there are so many

Yes, an image that's taken from three to four orders of magnitude further away is much worse than one taken from close up. Unless you spend a lot on the optics and make the satellite really big. But while the NRO is busy pointing space telescopes at earth, the private sector has so far been more interested in using these images to estimate crop yields over entire countries, or look at how full parking lots of certain companies are. For those use cases it's more useful to launch more lower-cost satellites to get more coverage more frequently, at the expense of quality.

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