Yeah, that's exactly the sort of thing that comes to mind and what might make the scheme work: not merely trying to serve an existing market but create an entirely new capability that can then command sufficient margins. Could the military have reusable birds on standby and then just be able to launch them for some specific conflict aiming for a quick lifetime at much lower altitude and with a path and period that wouldn't be known to adversaries? I haven't crunched the math, but in principle it seems like they could launch something stratospheric even, not high enough for a long term stable orbit but in turn could have higher mass and useful new intel gathering potential.

Of course economics still matters here even for the military, it still will be weighed against conventional satellites and spy planes and so on. But a sales pitch of:

>"We can pick up your bird from anywhere with enough runway, fly it to somewhere it can be launched at any time with minimal to zero worries about weather, other air traffic, or bothering (or even being visible to) populated areas, and hit any azimuth (no population overflight concerns either)"

seems like it might be worth something at least. It's certainly somewhat different beyond cost at least, even if it doesn't matter to most. The AF has their own robotic spaceplane project after all, seems like there is at least some interest in this kind of area?

From a quick google, a 200km orbit lasts roughly a day and it drops to zero very quickly after that, so I don’t think you could save too much by launching lower, but it might be worthwhile.

Dale Brown [1] wrote about this in his series of military techno-thriller novels, I think somewhere around Wings of Fire, written in 2002. Basically the idea is to have easy to launch constellations of micro-sats that could be launched to LEO to cover a specific area for a few days or weeks.

If this does come to fruit in real life, it wouldn't be the first time that ideas from his books have become reality 10-20 years later.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dale_Brown

In prior speculation on space-related forums, the only non-military application that seemed likely was space tourism. (The extra flexibility you get on launch site and timing could enable unusually quick rendezvous with a space station already in orbit -- which also has kind of obvious benefits to a hostile military.)

Not an easy thing to do. Getting a sat stabilized and orientated sufficiently to take good photos takes time. It would certainly be several days before such a small sat would be useful, giving them more than enough time to hide.

Is that a fundamental limit, or just how they’re currently built because they don’t need to do anything better?

I don’t know a whole lot about spy satellites, but the existence of things like spy planes and accurate ICBMs suggests the latter.

For small sats in low orbit it can be a very big deal. Before you can start snapping pictures accurately you need to confirm the actual orbit. You let the thing whip by a couple times to confirm its speed and altitude. Then it will likely be spinning a little. You need to wait for the aerodynamic forces to smooth that out.