You may not need a satellite yet. You almost certainly need the answers one produces.
Most of the questions governments and companies bring us do not require owning a spacecraft on day one. They require someone who can pull the right scenes from the right sensors, process them competently, and say what changed. That is what these products do. The open constellations, Copernicus Sentinel, Landsat and VIIRS, already photograph every point on Earth every few days, free of licence fees and free of another government's shutter control at the resolutions they offer. Commercial tasking gets added when a question needs sub-metre detail. Our daily Overhead column is this capability working in public.
- Maritime domain awareness — Vessel detection and dark-ship analysis across your waters: SAR imaging that sees through cloud and darkness, cross-referenced against AIS transponder data to flag the ships that are broadcasting nothing.
- Energy and commodities monitoring — Floating-roof tank storage levels, refinery and mine activity, gas flaring and stockpile volumes, measured from open imagery on a standing cadence.
- Agriculture and food security — Crop area, crop health and harvest progress measured from multispectral imagery at national scale. This is the analytics behind our Tonga crop-estimation programme, offered as a product.
- Conflict and security monitoring — Damage assessment, force-posture change detection and activity monitoring from open imagery. The OSINT discipline, done with method and shown in public every day in Overhead.
- Climate and environment — Methane plume detection, deforestation alerts, glacier and water-level tracking, burn-scar mapping: environmental monitoring from sensors whose data no operator can massage.
- Infrastructure and construction verification — Independent progress verification for large construction, mining and public-works projects: what has actually been built, cleared, paved or excavated, dated scene by scene.
- Disaster response mapping — Flood extent, wildfire, storm and earthquake damage mapping in the hours and days after an event, using radar that does not care about the weather that caused the disaster.
Overhead — daily satellite-image commentary