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I figure the market for "low" resolution imagery will be destroyed when Starlink decides to add something like a fixed wide angle 100 megapixel cameras to every

I figure the market for "low" resolution imagery will be destroyed when Starlink decides to add something like a fixed wide angle 100 megapixel cameras to every satellite. There are a lot of options for what to do from there, but getting continuous global imagery would suddenly be possible.

ge96 4y ago
Capture the Earth's surface state from giant sphere "pano", run simulations off of it
campchase 4y ago
Could be. I still think the juice won’t be worth the squeeze (is there an example in the history of comms satellites where they felt it was worth going after the much smaller EO market?). But the rumor in the industry is that they’re comin for everything. And they did just announce a new satellite platform for hosting payloads (including optical).
bagels 4y ago
Planet Labs captures ~30 megapixel images (usually though, these are quoted in terms of pixel size, eg. 5 meters per pixel) and has hundreds of satellites on orbit. 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?
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > 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.)
  - astrange 4y ago
    If you do need highres images, it’s cheaper to get someone like Vexcel to take them from a plane, and it’s much more flexible wrt cloud cover too. (That’s where the good “satellite” images in online maps come from.)
  - coredog64 4y ago
    I can think of a non-military use case: Tracking fishing vessels in the Pacific Ocean. Access to an EEZ is sold in “fishing days”. Vessels are required to have VMS, and there’s been work done on correlating VMS data with fishing, but it’s not a slam dunk. Immediate, high resolution photos would provide evidence of IUU such that the vessel could be intercepted and boarded while still within the EEZ. Even if the vessel can’t be boarded, high-res photographic evidence could be used to pursue legal action against the vessel’s owners.
    - m2fkxy 4y ago
      in maritime environments, I would argue you are better off tracking vessels with SAR + passive radiofrequency.
    - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
      > fishing vessels in the Pacific Ocean 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.
      - coredog64 4y ago
        Yes and no. These island nations are pretty small and poor, so obviously Fiji or Vanuatu aren't going to be paying for it. Instead, what I would expect is that the US, Australia, and New Zealand would pay for it to maintain good graces with these nations. WRT geopolitics, this is a good stick for beating up on China as they're one of the main offenders in IUU.
        4y ago
- tkinom 4y ago
  RPi+ Yolo can do real time object recognition of cluster Tank, Trucks, BMP from orbit. 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.
Zigurd 4y ago
If there are significant delays in Starship and getting gen 2 satellites up in economically viable ways, you can bet Starlink will be looking for adjacent markets as a way to boost revenue. Currently, satellite imaging is about a $5B market. Nice, but telecom is, without exaggeration, 300X larger. Starlink being a global internet connectivity provider with 10s of millions of subscribers is really the only goal that matters for SpaceX.
rrrix1 4y ago
You are vastly oversimplifying the problem here. One of the most obvious being, cameras don't really work without light on the subject being captured, and currently Starlink doesn't have a sun synchronous orbit like most (non-SAR) remote sensing birds do. Starlink would need to be completely reengineered from scratch to add even mediocre remote sensing capabilities without degrading the original mission of the Starlink platform (something akin to space mesh networking). Put simply, it's MUCH easier and cheaper to build one type of satellite that does one task very well than it is to do two tasks poorly.
- m2fkxy 4y ago
  SAR typically are in sun-synchronous orbits too, but mostly for power management reasons. difference is, of course, that they do not need to have their ascending node in daylight. the only SAR constellations I know aren't in SSO are Israeli (due to launch geometry constraints) and NRO's birds (LACROS/ONYX/TOPAZ, whatever their names are) [1]. some of them have exotic retrograde orbits [2]. [1] see e.g. https://space.skyrocket.de/doc_sdat/onyx.htm https://space.skyrocket.de/doc_sdat/onyx.htm [2] see e.g. https://spaceflight101.com/delta-iv-nrol-47/nrol-47/ https://spaceflight101.com/delta-iv-nrol-47/nrol-47/
  - campchase 4y ago
    Best comment in the thread, I knew about Onyx but nothing more than the Wikipedia page (hardly anything)
- ericd 4y ago
  Why is it a problem that it's not in sun-synchronous orbit? That just means that only a fraction will be usable at any given time? It seems like they have massive redundancy to make up for the lack of specialization?
kanbara 4y ago
not exactly how it works. as others have said, the orbit is incorrect for proper radiometric usage, and it would eat into their bandwidth and downlink constraints. doesn't make much sense

ge96 4y ago

Capture the Earth's surface state from giant sphere "pano", run simulations off of it

campchase 4y ago

Could be. I still think the juice won’t be worth the squeeze (is there an example in the history of comms satellites where they felt it was worth going after the much smaller EO market?). But the rumor in the industry is that they’re comin for everything. And they did just announce a new satellite platform for hosting payloads (including optical).

bagels 4y ago

Planet Labs captures ~30 megapixel images (usually though, these are quoted in terms of pixel size, eg. 5 meters per pixel) and has hundreds of satellites on orbit. 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?

JumpCrisscross 4y ago
> 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.)
- astrange 4y ago
  If you do need highres images, it’s cheaper to get someone like Vexcel to take them from a plane, and it’s much more flexible wrt cloud cover too. (That’s where the good “satellite” images in online maps come from.)
- coredog64 4y ago
  I can think of a non-military use case: Tracking fishing vessels in the Pacific Ocean. Access to an EEZ is sold in “fishing days”. Vessels are required to have VMS, and there’s been work done on correlating VMS data with fishing, but it’s not a slam dunk. Immediate, high resolution photos would provide evidence of IUU such that the vessel could be intercepted and boarded while still within the EEZ. Even if the vessel can’t be boarded, high-res photographic evidence could be used to pursue legal action against the vessel’s owners.
  - m2fkxy 4y ago
    in maritime environments, I would argue you are better off tracking vessels with SAR + passive radiofrequency.
  - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    > fishing vessels in the Pacific Ocean 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.
    - coredog64 4y ago
      Yes and no. These island nations are pretty small and poor, so obviously Fiji or Vanuatu aren't going to be paying for it. Instead, what I would expect is that the US, Australia, and New Zealand would pay for it to maintain good graces with these nations. WRT geopolitics, this is a good stick for beating up on China as they're one of the main offenders in IUU.
      - 4y ago
tkinom 4y ago
RPi+ Yolo can do real time object recognition of cluster Tank, Trucks, BMP from orbit. 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.

Zigurd 4y ago

If there are significant delays in Starship and getting gen 2 satellites up in economically viable ways, you can bet Starlink will be looking for adjacent markets as a way to boost revenue. Currently, satellite imaging is about a $5B market. Nice, but telecom is, without exaggeration, 300X larger. Starlink being a global internet connectivity provider with 10s of millions of subscribers is really the only goal that matters for SpaceX.

rrrix1 4y ago

You are vastly oversimplifying the problem here. One of the most obvious being, cameras don't really work without light on the subject being captured, and currently Starlink doesn't have a sun synchronous orbit like most (non-SAR) remote sensing birds do. Starlink would need to be completely reengineered from scratch to add even mediocre remote sensing capabilities without degrading the original mission of the Starlink platform (something akin to space mesh networking). Put simply, it's MUCH easier and cheaper to build one type of satellite that does one task very well than it is to do two tasks poorly.

m2fkxy 4y ago
SAR typically are in sun-synchronous orbits too, but mostly for power management reasons. difference is, of course, that they do not need to have their ascending node in daylight. the only SAR constellations I know aren't in SSO are Israeli (due to launch geometry constraints) and NRO's birds (LACROS/ONYX/TOPAZ, whatever their names are) [1]. some of them have exotic retrograde orbits [2]. [1] see e.g. https://space.skyrocket.de/doc_sdat/onyx.htm https://space.skyrocket.de/doc_sdat/onyx.htm [2] see e.g. https://spaceflight101.com/delta-iv-nrol-47/nrol-47/ https://spaceflight101.com/delta-iv-nrol-47/nrol-47/
- campchase 4y ago
  Best comment in the thread, I knew about Onyx but nothing more than the Wikipedia page (hardly anything)
ericd 4y ago
Why is it a problem that it's not in sun-synchronous orbit? That just means that only a fraction will be usable at any given time? It seems like they have massive redundancy to make up for the lack of specialization?

kanbara 4y ago

not exactly how it works. as others have said, the orbit is incorrect for proper radiometric usage, and it would eat into their bandwidth and downlink constraints. doesn't make much sense