We're taking the approach of using "free energy" in the form of 100,000+ daily commercial/freight/general aviation aircraft to crowdsource aerial imagery using mobile phones to start. Passengers who opt-in are rewarded with free in-flight wifi (where equipped), and we use the device to do orthorectification and photogrammetry at the edge before transmitting it back down via satellite internet. I'm glossing over much of the actual process, but this frees up a ton of computing that would otherwise have to be done on the ground. In the event the flight is not internet connected, we cache previous images based on flight path and upload the difference after comparing old vs. new on the device once signal is restored. End result is a massive boost in both temporal and spatial resolution at a dramatically lower cost. Think Google Maps, updated every few minutes.
We're on IG @notasatellite if you're interested in looking at some samples.
1. Cell phones from 30,000 ft are going to produce incredibly low resolution images, especially when taken through the window of an airliner. They're also all going to be oblique.
2. If you use real camera rigs, you're going to have to pay a fortune to outfit enough planes. Given that you don't control where the asset goes, this seems really inefficient.
3. Does the entire US actually get covered by all those flights? While ATC tries to give direct routing a lot more than they used to it still seems like you're going to end up with areas where planes hardly ever fly. I'd be really curious to see for a given swath what revisit rate you could get with what confidence from historical ADS-B data.
Please don't take this negatively. I previously cofounded an aerial imagery company and have designed aerial camera systems for a large aerospace company. I came up with an idea like yours, but wrote it off for the reasons I mentioned. It's really cool to see someone pursuing it. Feel free to reach out if you'd like. My email is cornell at cgw3 dot org.
1. Resolution is a function of altitude, atmospheric conditions, and camera capabilities. At 30,000ft with zoom, we can get results around 10cm/px on an average smartphone (iPhone SE 2). That's still pretty sharp but we can further enhance the image using satellite base maps, upscaling, and other inference techniques. Obliques can be corrected and used to assemble a "full image" when the opposite oblique is captured, but remains useful (to a certain point on the horizon--right now about 15 miles at cruising). There's still a vast amount of information we can obtain at higher altitudes including crop yield data, snow pack, reservoir/lake water levels, forest density, etc.
2. The physical device we're prototyping is about the size of a headphone case--I actually used a Bose QC25 headphone case to cast the model! There are a few potential avenues to deploy physical sensing hardware on flights including revenue sharing with airlines, using passengers to deploy, and other partnerships in the general aviation space. The DoD in particular has expressed interest in a purpose-built device for aerial sensing but for now, mobile device crowdsourcing in the commercial markets is the focus.
3. There are huge spots in and around US airspace where planes cannot (or generally do not) fly. Satellites will remain the key players when optimizing for coverage, but the high-frequency revisit I believe is best obtained using aerial imagery. I always like to tell people that's why we're "Not A Satellite" instead of "Anti-Satellite". There's more than enough room for both, and we see a huge opportunity to increase revisit and provide a complementary offering to satellite imagery.
We've looked at revisit frequency against ADS-B data and about 80% of the US sees at least 2 flights within a mile each day, exponentially more so around cities and developed areas. Many of our customers are interested in monitoring sites within 15 miles of a major international airport, so we're able to obtain high-resolution images using mobile devices because aircraft are typically below ~8,000ft within that radius. LAX for example can see as many as 500 takeoffs and landings each day, and there are hundreds of industrial sites (ports, fulfillment warehouses, other infrastructure) within the approach path.
I genuinely appreciate your questions. We're still early-stage and the discussions I've had on HN alone have vastly improved the quality of our pitch, business plan, and exposed major blind spots. Thanks again for the kind words, and I'll be sure to drop you a line!
We've also developed our own sensing device prototype we call "The Box" that's equipped with a much more powerful array of sensors, but the mobile device-sensing approach makes the most sense for a scalable MVP.
In order to maximize battery life and prevent user fatigue, we only alert the user to begin recording when they're approaching a task coordinate by referencing the cached coordinate with the current GPS coordinate which is readily available even in Airplane mode. The "workload" for test users so far averages about 5 alerts per flight or 5-10 minutes of "recording", typically shortly after takeoff and prior to landing. We're using Lobe to train an ML model with the image feeds, so we're working on implementing a Captcha-style post-flight survey where a few sample images taken in flight are presented to the user for first-pass labeling. If a user completes this survey, they're rewarded with additional airline miles as a thank you
There are plenty of other opportunities to gamify the recording process and we've been taking cues from apps like Waze and OpenStreetMaps to inform some of these potential reward features. Possibilities include revenue sharing, free flights after reaching milestones, travel gear, etc. I remember flying Spirit years ago and they always had a fun way to reward the unlucky souls in the middle seat by putting a sticker on one of the tray tables. The passenger sitting in the "lucky" middle seat got a free round-trip ticket which I've always thought was really cool, so perks like those are top of mind as well.
Tl;dr - we're intent on keeping the UX transparent, engaging, and unobtrusive for the recorder--point, shoot, disembark--while rewarding them in kind for their time and effort.
And the market for near-real-time imagery might be even larger than the market for internet connectivity.
I also doubt you could just slap a camera on Starlink satellites. Even ignoring payload size/weight, power consumption, etc, you're typically fighting 3 different constraints when you decide which way to rotate your satellite (sun exposure for power, antenna direction for high-bandwidth network, payload direction if you have cameras or other directional sensors). They're not going to want to try to deal with that for the first iteration of their fleet.
Now, with the resolution relaxation from the United States Government that went into effect on February 21, 2015, you have access to an even clearer view of the ground with 30-centimeter resolution commercial satellite imagery.
https://spacenews.com/a-detailed-view-of-the-ground-with-30-...
WorldView-3 is the industry’s first multi-payload, super-spectral, highresolution commercial satellite. Operating at an altitude of 617 km, WorldView-3 provides 31 cm panchromatic resolution, 1.24 m multispectral resolution, 3.7 m short-wave infrared resolution, and 30 m CAVIS resolution. WorldView-3 has an average revisit time of less than one day and is capable of collecting up to 680,000 sq km per day, further enhancing the Maxar collection capacity for more rapid and reliable collection.
https://www.maxar.com/constellation
WorldView-3: Mass: 2800 kg (6200 lbs) Power: 3.1 kW solar array, Altitude: 617 km
Starlink: Mass: v 1.0: 260 kg (573 lb) Power: 6 kW solar array, Altitude: 550 km
https://lilibots.blogspot.com/2020/04/starlink-satellite-dim...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink#Constellation_design_...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/blimplike...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tethered_Aerostat_Radar_System
So that means most of the south and north part of the earth cannot be covered with such a constellation; they would need to be orbiting satellites, which makes "real time" even harder, because it would require an enormously complex choreography to ensure there's at least one satellite covering each square meter, at all times.
[1] https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/71582/is-it-poss...
It wouldn't be the most practical orbit for narrow FOV imagery but for polar weather, communications, and monitoring for things like over the pole missile launches they're pretty useful.
The entire globe has about 500 billion square meters. 24 bit uncompressed imagery is thus 1.5TB per global image. With some modest compression, you could get a video stream of that from the Starlink network, although the current design of Starlink would make it hard to have room for an aperture with better than, say, 3 meter resolution.
That said, it would be really difficult and quite likely not at all worth it.
That's a very bold claim with no support provided.
Though the live imagery would now need night vision cameras, as we blocked out all our light with our camera support. But one has to take the good with the bad ;)
I think most accepted approaches to constructing a sphere involve first building a series of structural components to form a stable net - as such we could stop the process when we've got just enough structure in place for stability and not so much that we need night vision cameras buuuut... I typed that before buying a bunch of night vision stock so please disregard the first portion of this paragraph - we would absolutely need night vision cameras from every angle.
Just wanting to learn more about this.
Looking for higher resolution (3m), the only viable option really is Planet. Even at that, they're pretty iffy with their pricing models and distribution. I think they range around the $2 per square kilometre mark.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27067945 [2] https://www.albedo.space/
The resolution and angles for your point of interest will change but you should be able to keep a near-constant coverage.
Heck, put up 100,000 satellites and use the same kind of tech Apple/Google/MS use in their 3D views of cities (it, they do take airplane and satellite photos at various angles, and use software to stitch together the separate pieces).
Seems totally possible to meet OP's request given money not being an issue.
The net result is that updated-daily imagery exists, but real-time does not. While I'm not privy to the capabilities of the US military, the kind of real-time planet-wide surveillance that movies like Enemy of the State suggest doesn't exist planet-wide.
The highest-resolution images on e.g. Google Maps are from planes, rather than satellites, and aren't imaged anywhere near daily. The only way to have constant, real-time imaging of a fixed location is with a geostationary satellite, which will be so far away (22,000 miles) that the resolution will be low.
Given an unlimited budget, a huge constellation of hundreds or thousands of satellites could come close to real-time planet-wide imaging, but even then, you'd be getting views at different angles as various satellites took images, and you wouldn't ever have a clear directly-overhead view of people walking around.