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

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).

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.)

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.)

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.

> 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.

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.

in maritime environments, I would argue you are better off tracking vessels with SAR + passive radiofrequency.

Ship tracking via SAR has been around for nearly a decade

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.

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.

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.

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

[2] see e.g. https://spaceflight101.com/delta-iv-nrol-47/nrol-47/

Best comment in the thread, I knew about Onyx but nothing more than the Wikipedia page (hardly anything)

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?

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