Just imagine highly classified intelligence information in the hands of dangerous people like Moron Musk
Just imagine the US goes to war and Elon shuts them off because some foreign leader strokes his (let’s say) ego.
Starsheild is just a satellite bus, which is just sorta like the central building block for satellites. It handles communication, navigation, etc. The government will likely be in total control of the system once it’s deployed.
Probably a lot from star link business but separately, launching a government satellite does not give you continued access to that satellite’s business.
satellites are orbiting
There are about half a dozen small companies working on this but apparently the government is more interested in spending money on a company with zero experience with earth imaging. Dunno how I feel about the USG just putting all their eggs in Elon’s batshit insane basket
My guess is the optics themselves don’t need to be very mind blowing anymore. If this is a constellation, you will basically have the ability to combine many lesser quality images into higher res versions for review, and in near realtime, and from many different angles. Slap some AI upscaling magic in there, some object tracking and things like gait and attribute recognition, and you have something fairly close to ‘Enemy of the State’ capabilities, minus all the BS zooming and looking through walls.