[Alasater]

Indeed a 9x in resolution is a big ol chunk of data, and primarily, increases in the bands collected (PAN vs RGB vs NIIR vs LWIR vs hyperspectral/multispectral) data is one piece of a complicated puzzle of how to get data to the ground. Previous entrants have spent a lot of money building out their own networks and infrastructure, helping contribute to high costs of imagery. We look to leverage the ground-station-as-a-service industries such as AWS, KSAT, and Azure Orbital to help downlink our data. Add to that a switch over to Ka band (higher bandwidth) with inter-satellite links in the tradespace, you start to help the data problem. As well, every image provider does some amount of lossless compression (compressing the non-informative data) to help manage some of that. But the overall data to manage is also a factor of how much tasking you anticipate per rev, if the image you collected is actually useful (ie clouds), if the customer is interested in all those bands for their task, and many more variables.

In terms of the 'big dish' gateway infrastructure, it eases link budgets and opens bigger pipes, but if you're limited in your output power and your access, having smaller dishes and more proliferated networks may make more sense (sounds similar to your Big satellite vs many small satellite trades :) )