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It’s so depressing to read that one proposed mission for this plane is…monitoring oil spills.

I worked on a satellite imaging startup. For this kind of stuff usually oil and gas and large scale agriculture are the first ones to show interest. They don't need great resolution or revisit times and their assets span over very big areas so monitoring from the ground/sea or with small drones is really expensive.

Depends on the appplication. An NDVI analysis or determining vast crop / growth problems yes but if you want to check for disease this is often done by drones to have higher resolution. I could imagine doing regular field visits with these planes and avoid the high labor costs of drone management/flying.

Sources: I work in a big agtech company with satellite imagery. PS: We should connect.

Why is that depressing? Unless you have some silver bullet to remove the need for oil or prevent any future oil spills it seems like creating innovative technologies to detect them as soon as possible is a good thing.

It would be like if someone developed a cheap, non-invasive technology that could detect cancer extremely early, and then you complained because they hadn't cured cancer instead.

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