“[Imagery from] five years ago is great, but how about from last year, last month, last week, yesterday?’”

Larsen leads Urthecast. It’s one of a cadre of startups—three are now out of stealth mode—tossing cameras out of the atmosphere and trying to turn them into a business. Each of the three is choosing different methods, different kinds of devices, and different orbits. Each is selling something a little different. They are Urthecast, Planet Labs, and Skybox.

Urthecast, for instance, plans to install two cameras—one still and one video—on the International Space Station, then beam video down using the Russian Space Agency’s antennae. Planet Labs, another, hopes to send 28 satellites, each about the size of a garden gnome, into low orbit. It will immediately control the largest private Earth-observing fleet of satellites ever created. SkyBox, finally, only hopes to operate two satellites in the next year—but its business plan seems most promising, and borrows the most from the modern startup playbook.

The capital and efficiency engines of Silicon Valley, having transformed markets and interactions both public and private on Earth, now look skyward.

Silicon Valley is making what, in any other decade, we’d call spy satellites.

Orbiting Cameras, Operated by Behemoths

Like the geography they depict, it can be easy to feel like the pictures in Google Earth have always been there, like they don’t have a history or a source.

In fact, a set of accreted structures dictate what and how satellite imagery reaches American consumers. Some of these limits are governmental: The U.S. government restricts the resolution of imagery that can be sold to the public, for example. Today, if the side of one pixel of Earth imagery is less than 50 centimeters long, it can’t be sold in America. (Though regulators may soon loosen those limits.)

The marketplace limits buyers still further, though. If you go looking for medium-resolution imagery, you’ll find it a hard task. If you want a picture of your house—or your pipeline—who do you buy it from?

You have a few options. You might download it for free from weather satellites, like those in NASA’s MODIS program. MODIS imagery is quite low-resolution, though: It will give you good (sometimes beautiful) photos of the clouds over your home state.

Other options are prohibitively expensive. The pan-European consortium that owns the airplane-manufacturer Airbus also operates a satellite company called Astrium, which sells imagery commercially. The German company Blackbridge and the Israeli ImageSat do the same. A few governments—Taiwan, India, South Korea—will sell imagery from their spy satellites to you.

There’s also data from some other U.S. government-run projects, like the long-running Landsat program. That imagery’s free, and sometimes recent—but it’s not very high-resolution. Really, there’s only one American company that will sell you imagery in the medium- to high-range: Digital Globe.