Kai Risdahl

You can't look at it anymore.

And, you know, they kind of decide on a case-by-case basis what to let out.

The ostensible reason here has to be national security, right?

That's what the Pentagon and the government was asking?

Yeah.

So at the highest resolution that these images, that these satellites can image at, you know, you can make out really detailed battle damage assessments.

You can look at

You can look at troop movements and things like that.

But I also talked to other people who are experts in the same sector who say that because of the latency that's involved in actually from when an image gets captured in space, that actually getting on the ground and you having time to look at it, that latency is kind of long enough such that it's not really relevant from a military standpoint.

And so I would say critics would say that there's not really legitimate military reasons, but really this is more about bad press.

Huh.

So what are would-be customers of Planet Labs and Bloomberg as well doing?

Are there other sources?

Can they go to like a Chinese satellite imaging company?

You guessed it.

So China is a huge player in Earth observation.

After the US, they're kind of the next biggest player in terms of capability, in terms of getting images from space.

Some folks that I talked to from the commercial side, a lot of those folks are turning to companies that are not based in the US.

So Airbus is a big example.

So people are considering Chinese imagery as well.