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The satellite imagery industry still has no idea what customers want

joemorrison.substack.com

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Re: The satellite imagery industry still has no idea what customers want

#91
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it’s very, very unlikely. It would risk giving away information on the capabilities of US national security assets. Which is classified literally as highly as it is possible to classify. We don’t even let the Five Eyes know that stuff, much less hand it to non-aligned militaries who we can’t vet. Plus, it doesn’t appear to be needed. The Russian military is proving to be god-awful at even basic field ops like…

Too late. President Trump already publicly gave away information on the capabilities of US spy satellites in 2019. https://news.yahoo.com/trump-tweeted-classified-satellite-im...

"gave away" old tech that just confirmed what everyone assumed. Your article even states it's not our best and most of the security agencies cared more about the process of how he did it then the image itself.

Re: The satellite imagery industry still has no idea what customers want

#92

Me: 20 years in the defense space business. Stating my own opinion. This is basically right. The problem with space imagery is that almost everyone who wants it has a niche use case, and those few organizations without a niche use case (the US Weather Service, various militaries, etc) generally want imagery that's so specialized to their own problem that they have to spec, buy, and operate their own orbital assets. T…

One company trying to address that is Up42, a subsidiary (hope that's the appropriate term) of Airbus, building some marketplace for SAT imaging analysis.

Interested to hear Mr. glen's opinion about that approach.

Re: The satellite imagery industry still has no idea what customers want

#94

A year or so ago there was a long-ish discussion about countthings.com—technologically, a very simple app that's seemingly found a lot of value in having a close product-market fit and being able to (efficiently) sell to customers that don't have their own ability to build custom CV solutions. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27261399 I really understand the author's argument that lots of satellite companies are…

Great observation. Check out Descartes Labs (all-purpose platform) or Picterra (closer to CountThings for sat imagery) as two examples of companies trying to make it easier to build personalized models.

Re: The satellite imagery industry still has no idea what customers want

#95
post #74

I found the argument(s) interesting although the animations hurt readability and clarity. I've watched the area of commercialized remote sensing products with some interest, because I'm in the non-commercial remote sensing line. The way NASA handles derived data products is (broadly) through "levels": L0: measurement, still in instrument native units (e.g., DN's) L1: calibrated and put into physical units (e.g., watt…

Thanks for taking the time to write this out, great info.

There are two hallmarks of an application that differentiate it from a data service:

1. Earth observation is a minority of the data that it manages and maintains

2. Users are not just presented with information, they are prompted to take action

I would argue that levels L3 and L4 are probably falling into the same trap as the data feeds I described in the blog post. Do you know if USGS publishes download metrics are available for each dataset associated with Landsat, for instance? I bet if you made a ratio of time/investment to downloads, you'd find L2 outperforms all other categories. But I could be wrong; I have never seen the download data and don't know the relative levels of effort to produce each dataset they offer.

Re: The satellite imagery industry still has no idea what customers want

#96
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't think the US military is providing for all of Ukraine's satellite intelligence needs?

I think it’s very, very unlikely. It would risk giving away information on the capabilities of US national security assets. Which is classified literally as highly as it is possible to classify. We don’t even let the Five Eyes know that stuff, much less hand it to non-aligned militaries who we can’t vet. Plus, it doesn’t appear to be needed. The Russian military is proving to be god-awful at even basic field ops like…

> It would risk giving away information on the capabilities of US national security assets.

But the actual satellites can be seen with the naked eye, and their orbits are known. The resolution is a linear function of their height, so it can be easily inferred, or at least bounded, by that of a "hubble" at a much lower height. If they are really worried about this scalar piece of data, they can easily blur the images before transferring them to ukraine. Not that it makes a lot of difference to see a column of tanks at 30cm or at 15cm pixels.

Re: The satellite imagery industry still has no idea what customers want

#97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it’s very, very unlikely. It would risk giving away information on the capabilities of US national security assets. Which is classified literally as highly as it is possible to classify. We don’t even let the Five Eyes know that stuff, much less hand it to non-aligned militaries who we can’t vet. Plus, it doesn’t appear to be needed. The Russian military is proving to be god-awful at even basic field ops like…

> It would risk giving away information on the capabilities of US national security assets. But the actual satellites can be seen with the naked eye, and their orbits are known. The resolution is a linear function of their height, so it can be easily inferred, or at least bounded, by that of a "hubble" at a much lower height. If they are really worried about this scalar piece of data, they can easily blur the images…

"The resolution is a linear function of their height..."

Incorrect. Even in the consumer camera space, resolution is a function of distance, native sensor resolution, lens magnification, lens quality, shutter speed (because the target is moving), stability of the tripod, etc. Same thing is true of orbital imagery: your effective resolution is a function of your optics, your sensor, the ability of your attitude control system to hold a steady pointing vector, etc.

Also, "capability" != "resolution". What frequency bands is that satellite imaging in? Visible, SWIR, LWIR, ultraviolet? What is the effective magnification of its optics? Is it an optical system at all, or is it an RF bird? Is it all of the above? Does it just take top down snapshots, or can it track moving targets? If the latter how fast can it track? Fast enough to keep up with a tank, or fast enough to keep up with a fighter plane? How many frames per pass can it take? How fast can it slew to get multiple objects in the same pass? Etc.

Re: The satellite imagery industry still has no idea what customers want

#98

Me: 20 years in the defense space business. Stating my own opinion. This is basically right. The problem with space imagery is that almost everyone who wants it has a niche use case, and those few organizations without a niche use case (the US Weather Service, various militaries, etc) generally want imagery that's so specialized to their own problem that they have to spec, buy, and operate their own orbital assets. T…

> The problem with space imagery is that almost everyone who wants it has a niche use case But this is a good problem. It's like saying "the problem with motors is that everyone who uses them has a niche use case" (submarines, cars, airplanes, industrial machinery...). Or that "the problem with microscopy is that everyone who wants it has a niche use case". And indeed it does! Microscopes for biologists are different…

It's only a good problem when your niche customers have deep pockets to pay for their varied needs and high risk tolerance. Most variations can't be protyped out by some engineer on the weekends where they just spin out a startup with minimal risk to address the gap.

The false assumption I deal with that drives me insane with so many individuals is that everyone thinks their specialized use case is a small variation on the major use case that already benefits from economies of scale. That often isn't the case and a significant R&D effort needs to go underway on just how one can leverage existing technology for their use case.

There's very often at least one, if not many, mission critical functional requirements from existing tech that require significant effort to make the jump from the existing tech to the desired use case. And guess what, all the non-niche users don't want to pay for that, so you need to be prepared to pony up the capital, accept risk of failure, and be ready to take the plunge.

I tell people with this mentality that they need to work in reverse, first understand the technology they think is close and find the problem sets that have the best match up and focus on those. These efforts can costs hundreds of thousands very easily if not millions to tens of millions if you just play it by ear that "...this thing is sorta like what we want so it can't possibly be that difficult to adapt." (Basically what I hear with technology management, many business people, and clients)

Many people pretend software and tech are just Lego blocks and since it's virtual, there's no capital needed. Good luck, because the skills needed to deal with this tech isn't cheap and the complexity often isn't low meaning expensive and difficult to find labor for long periods of time, often with a fairly good chance of failure.

Re: The satellite imagery industry still has no idea what customers want

#99

>In my opinion, every supervised machine learning model is hopelessly biased by the intent of its creator(s). Namely, it inherits the bias of its training dataset (both geographic and semantic). Profound. And True. Sometimes I wonder whether we can truly call them learning models at all.

It's why they are called models and not just "how it works" or absolute truth.

I know several industries filled with questionable researchers who might disagree with you. For clarity, I agree with you for most all cases.

Re: The satellite imagery industry still has no idea what customers want

#100

Me: 20 years in the defense space business. Stating my own opinion. This is basically right. The problem with space imagery is that almost everyone who wants it has a niche use case, and those few organizations without a niche use case (the US Weather Service, various militaries, etc) generally want imagery that's so specialized to their own problem that they have to spec, buy, and operate their own orbital assets. T…

> The problem with space imagery is that almost everyone who wants it has a niche use case But this is a good problem. It's like saying "the problem with motors is that everyone who uses them has a niche use case" (submarines, cars, airplanes, industrial machinery...). Or that "the problem with microscopy is that everyone who wants it has a niche use case". And indeed it does! Microscopes for biologists are different…

> like saying "the problem with motors is that everyone who uses them has a niche use case" (submarines, cars, airplanes, industrial machinery...)

This is a good analogy. How many companies say “I’ll build a sweet motor and then find a customer for it”? They don’t. They build the motor for the application. (More often, they build something close to the final product.)

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