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?
> 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.)
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.
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.
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.
> what I would expect is that the US, Australia, and New Zealand would pay for it to maintain good graces with these nations
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.
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.
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?