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