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Comment by mmaunder | Hacker News Reader

I want SpaceX to put cameras on their Starlink fleet and provide near real-time satellite views via a Google maps interface down to 30cm resolution across most of the planet. As they phase out old birds and deploy new ones this is feasible for them. Each bird already has connectivity. They just need the cameras.

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Worldview-4 (a commercial 30-cm satellite) had a reasonably similar orbit and 10 times of the mass of a Starlink satellite. Even if they are able to significantly improve on that design, it's still going to be a pretty big "just need the camera".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldView-4

Unfortunately, physics won't allow for that - with optical instruments you need a big aperture (lens) or you need to fly much lower than Starlink, or both. 1 or 2m imagery may definitely be possible, though! Check out BlackSky for reference.

If you can assume the scene you're capturing is fairly static over time, you can sometimes sort of cheat physics a little bit (keeping space constant and leveraging time) by resampling areas multiple times from different perspectives and cleverly combining that data together

Problem is that most the interesting bits people want more data on are quite dynamic in space and time, not just time. Even when it's not you don't gain linear subsampling improvements and eventually get diminishing returns with such approaches.

Huh I never thought of that, but that’s a great observation

I heard their new feets will be able to charge at a faster speed when sitting on a compatible pole wire.

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