>>14063845>>14063863Basically, imagine for a second that you have 10,000 of 2.0 sats into LEO, and one of the expansion slots has a 4K ccd sensor that's fronted by a 1-3 foot wide lens that's pointed down. Every square inch of the globe is covered by these camera, with data being selectively deleted for areas of natsec for every country obviously. But for all international and civilian areas of the Earth. The amount of realtime data you'd get of the planet would be worth hundreds of billions if not trillions of dollars to every country worldwide. SpaceX could very well do this themselves or partner with any company that can supply the hardware. All this data that's collected is beamformed and transmitted back through the Starlink network to the ground.
Under this paradigm, flight losses like Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 which just plain fucking vanished into the ether, would be downright impossible to happen. Any flight path a commercial airline takes would be tracked via these camera sources and any sat overhead in a 350-400km orbit would be relatively close enough to be able to detect it by counting the raw photons and grabbing the object discrepancy against the background water/land (due to vector information).
If some ship gets lost at sea or runs aground somewhere remote, Starlink via these sensor expansion packs would be able to "track" as each sat passing over that area, takes a shot of that area in realtime; and developlments are tracked by rescue authorities, so they know exactly what's the state of the vessel before they get there. Same thing with forest fires. Same thing with volcanic eruptions, avalanches, mudslides, earthquakes, tsunamis, almost all natural disasters. This value to society, as a result, is so immense, it completely outstrips any ground based astronomy complaints that can be made.
