[syedkarim]

Thanks for the reply. Are you able to comment a bit more on the costs. I’m particularly curious about your statement about balloons being orders of magnitude less expensive than satellites. Does that mean 1/1000 the cost or 1/100 the cost? I ask because LEO satellites with usable power (50W) no longer cost millions, or even a single million to put on orbit. And they have operational lifespans of 5 years.

[BalloonsInVLEO]

I'm talking all up costs (cost to first pixels), so the cost to acquire a bus and payload then launch it vs buy a balloon with an imager payload and release it. Any comparable satellite right now is likely closer to hundreds of millions just due to necessary aperture size. A balloon launch for an imagery collect will run you under 30k all in, and you can reuse most of the system after you recover it.

LEO is cheap but you need a massive aperture, measured in meters, to get equivalent GSD to even the crappiest balloon imager, so the price tag suddenly jumps. These aren't cubesats, they're suddenly the size of a bus, see Worldview Legion for a recent comparison, and it has a much worse nadir GSD than balloons.

VLEO is still extremely expensive because you need a very robust propulsion system and there are other design considerations like atomic oxygen corrosion. The optics to match a balloon also put you into the mini-fridge to refrigerator sized optics assembly class which means while you can rideshare, it's not cheap to build or launch, see Albedo space:

https://albedo.com/post/upcoming-launch-of-clarity-1-and-alb...

Also the regulatory issues are still massive, you need to get a NOAA license for imagery and once you go under a certain GSD limit they become very difficult to obtain.