Could someone more knowledgeable about this field explain what advantages this would have over the incumbents?
The geostationary satellites are perched very high above the earth, and take frequent pictures of the 'full disk' of earth. This is invaluable for weather forecasting, as we can see what clouds are doing in real time. However, they are so far away that you need big, expensive satellites and big, expensive launches, and the resulting resolution is quite poor (like one pixel per 5km depending on latitude, and worse at high latitudes).
On the other hand, the low-earth orbit satellites fly just above the atmosphere, and can take pictures at much higher (spatial) resolution, but may only fly over a particular spot of land once per day. So you trade temporal resolution for spatial resolution.
With miniaturization, advances in imaging and related technology, and decreasing launch costs, it should be possible to deploy a constellation of small low-earth-orbit satellites, to provide good temporal AND spatial resolution. That enables a whole bunch of new applications.
However, I'd be a bit concerned that long-lived airborne drones flying at high altitudes might do the same thing (good spatial AND temporal resolution), but at a lower price point and in a more efficient way (since you only fly where you want to look, instead of covering the entire globe).
Perhaps I'm missing something?
Even less frequent: Landsat 8 repeats every 16 days: http://www.usgs.gov/blogs/features/usgs_top_story/landsat-8-...
One advantage they're keen to promote is that a 15-year lifespan sat has, by the end of its life, a 15-year-old camera. Technology marches on, and small cheap (nearly disposable!) satellites can just roll improvements into their replacement cycle in a way that the big boys can't.
Do airspace laws still go all the way up to if you can fly at say 60-80,00ft? I guess they must, we're talking about private spy planes aren't we.
To get a sense of what 17,000 mph ground speed looks like from a satellite's point of view: https://www.planet.com/pulse/la-to-vegas-in-52-seconds/
With orbiting satellites, most of the time the birds are over the ocean and empty stretches of land that most people don't care about. You're wasting most of your bandwidth and storage on places that someone might be interested in one day...
Don't get me wrong, the work you're doing is very cool, and global data sets are really fun! Unfortunately, I've found that the 'value density' of these global data sets isn't great.
How do you know nobody is interested in the 'ocean and empty stretches of land'? It could provide a lot of meteorological and geological data for scientists for example.
Our main use case was for wind and solar renewable energy, but we also entertained other uses, like architecture and agriculture. These data sets turned out to be difficult to monetize; while the continental US data set may have broken even, the rest of the globe never recouped the cost of storage, let alone the supercomputer time. It's not that people around the world weren't interested in the data, they just couldn't justify paying for it.