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> You can use radar satellite imagery of your various business facilities such as parking lots, logistic centers, and retail stores

Could this be used to monitor someone's home?

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Yes. This is just the ground station, though, you would still need to put a satellite in orbit to receive messages from, however. And remember that it's somewhat expensive in terms of delta-V budget to have the satellite over someone's house exactly when you want it to be. Most people that want to spy on their neighbor will just buy a $30 spy cam with a 4G uplink.

I know that some have worked on this... but have given thought to how one could use lower power hives/swarms in order to do surveillance. Not so much for spying on neighbors but virtual tours of national parks and monuments, stitching many photos together to form 3D tour space.

High end capacitors over batteries, and a swarm where individual drones come home to charge, keeping roughly 1/3-1/2 in reserve and accounting for flight times to/from target area...

For less coverage, of course, less drones would be needed. Getting down closer to the size between a large bug and small bird's body for total size would probably be needed as well for a bit of stealth... noise is another concern. Interesting work/ideas.

Surveillance satellites aren't normally in geostationary orbits either, as that's too far away for the optics. Your deltav comment alludes to it. They seem to be into highly elliptical orbits.

You would need an insane amount of LEO satellites in order to get a feed which was continuous. I don't even know how to start doing the maths on this one.

How about equipping every Starlink satelite with some optics?

Well, you're not going to be able to make out a house from 100x farther away either.

Thanks to Trump's inability to not tweet anything he sees, we know that Block 4 KH-11 satellites have a 10cm/pixel about standard (they're in an elliptical orbit, but they use which ever is closest at the time). So we're looking at a 10M/pixel in geostationary orbit, assuming you can get the same optics that NROL was shipping up as late as 2013.

> Thanks to Trump's inability to not tweet anything he sees

If there’s one thing I hate about that guy, it’s his being the most transparent presidency in history.

His actions are sort of the worst of both worlds here. On one hand leaking information that's only useful to geopolitical adversaries (probably because he didn't understand the implications of tweeting stuff like that), and on the other hand being a new bar for destruction of public records when it comes to decisions made by the administration (somehow even beating out the Obama administration).

https://www.democracynow.org/2020/2/6/national_archives_reco...

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/06/10/trump-papers-filin...

It'd be a huge stretch to call it "the most transparent presidency in history".

> On one hand leaking information that's only useful to geopolitical adversaries

What did he leak? From what I can tell, the photo merely confirmed what was already a reasonable educated guess.

The resolution of the optics.

Why do you think it was a secret to anyone? Any amateur astronomer can figure it out from mirror size and orbital parameters.

A 1968 NASA publication (sold for $3.00) discusses various limitations, concluding: "The telescope objective for best resolution, as viewed from a satellite at an altitude of 320 kilometers, requires a diameter of about 1.6 meters to resolve a 12-centimeter radius" https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/196900...

That approximately 10 cm resolution has always been a resonable guess of the capabilities of best spy satellites. Trump's tweet surprised no-one. It confirmed what has always been thought to be true.

But if a $30 spy cam with 4G uplink was detected by the marks anti-surveillance regime (https://www.bastille.net/cell-phone-detection) you could be talking a huge liability. Might be more discreet to use satellites with lower cost if things don't work out so great.

This is a "bring-your-own-satellite" service.

Monitor their home? No. Imagery from space is only on a 90 minute interval and clouds get in the way. See digitalglobe.com for pricing. It's about $5k per square km iirc.

(With more satellites you can get more frequent coverage of course.)

Radar of course is weatherproof but again the cost is ridiculous unless you are a government or Exxon.

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