Earlier quoted context omitted.
(I used to work at planet, this is my recollection of what was the case then) Usually, for ocean-sized bodies of water, we'd stop imaging entirely to reduce power load and align the solar panels with the sun. Effectively all of the ocean had nothing going on on the surface that we could image anyway. When Planet gets the imagery, they have a fairly good sense of where it is, but it is still processed to get it to ali…
You could track container ships, in fact they're probably so easy to detect you could run a small computer vision model on the satellite and only transmit those photos. Obviously the most interesting container ships are the ones that you can see from space but don't show up on marine trackers. Although I don't know how you turn that information into money. Actually someone must already be doing this, Airbus sponsored…
If you want to track ships that want to be seen, basically everybody has AIS receivers up there (although I understand that's not trivial to sort out from space). If you want to track ships that aren't broadcasting, use radar.