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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

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It's possible that there's some classified version we wouldn't know about, but officially geostationary satellites are near-universally focused on satellite communications or maritime telephone, data transfer, and news communications, with a small number of weather satellites that take very low ground resolution images of a third of the globe. If you buy satellite imagery (it's not even that expensive!) you're usually going to buy 'low'-altitude operations from 500km to 1000km, and they'll usually cross their entire overlap area in less than a minute and an orbit in less than two hours.

It's theoretically possible to set a geostat with a telescope looking down, but there's not much advantage and a ton of cost to doing so, and they wouldn't be able to scale to many targets.

That said, there's enough low-orbit satellites that they can image an area pretty regularly. 24/7 coverage isn't plausible and this rounds to only getting an image of a location every hour or two at most, but the bigger flaw would mostly fall for technical reasons due to clouds or nighttime imagery (uh, presuming there's no classified super-nighttime cameras out there). And there's a small business in aerial imaging that can monitor cities for most of a day.

but the bigger flaw would mostly fall for technical reasons due to clouds or nighttime imagery

Synthetic Aperture Radar can do some of these conditions, but isn't exactly equivalent to visible imagery. The technology exists and there are commercial providers operating satellites that acknowledge working with the US government.

That's my understanding. Probably the Americans have 10 or so super-cameras hidden up there but moving the orbits of a geo-stationary satellite regularly to focus on different targets would require unsustainable amounts of propellant - I doubt they monitor anything except the highest value targets.

I imagine the hardest bit with all the low-orbit satellites is collating the data between them properly and adjusting for the differences in perspective or whatever. Night-time imagery isn't a problem I think - you can use black-body (thermal) radiation plus reflected light from human sources plus whatever weird spectra you can find floating around. But yeah, I think you'd be getting every few hours or something.