alt Hacker NewsI wonder what "earth observation" opportunities there would be with such megaconstellations, from simply having a camera with a telephoto lens pointed down to a giant, sky-spanning Synthetic Aperture Radar utilizing multiple satellites.
Anything like that would explain the secrecy...
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Apparently you can't hide from Starshield so I'm guessing it's pretty good. https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/11/nro-chief-you-cant-h...
There are already commercial constellations on orbit doing EO and SAR: Planet Labs, Capella, IceEYE, Umbra, Maxar, and more.
The observation cadence could be game-changing. Instead of once-, twice- daily revisit times, in principle you could contemplate continuous observation, of large parts of the Earth, from LEO, with enough downstream bandwidth to make interesting use of all that data.
It’s a 450km orbit. Cameras are good, but you’d need quite a bit of mass per satellite to identify anything of interest that isn’t already covered by other satellites. At a certain point photography becomes more a matter of optics (using lens to collect light) than anything else.
Probably few. The US has excellent observers and comms sats by the dozens are not very big. It's true you can get some photos but the kind you're thinking of, where you can track vehicles in a meaningful way or something, has to be done by something closer to the hubble telescope (pointed backwards).