“Skybox’s satellites will help keep Google Maps accurate with up-to-date imagery,” Google said. “Over time, we also hope that Skybox’s team and technology will be able to help improve Internet access and disaster relief — areas Google has long been interested in.”

“The time is right to join a company who can challenge us to think even bigger and bolder, and who can support us in accelerating our ambitious vision,” Skybox said in a blog post.

But what else might Google do with satellites?

The Skybox buy is the latest in a series of “moonshot” acquisitions — Google chief executive Larry Page’s term for ambitious long-term projects — that underscore Google’s soaring ambitions.

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Google recently bought Titan Aerospace, a company that makes solar-powered drones. Last year, the company announced Project Loon, which aims to bring the Web to the two-thirds of the world still offline by sending antennae-equipped balloons into the atmosphere to offer Internet access.

If Google wants to keep growing, reaching for the moon may be the only option, according to Business Insider’s Megan Rose Dickey:

“Google is basically in its third phase. It’s already mastered search and advertising, which were core desktop activities in the mid-2000s. Mobile came next, with its Android platform. … In order to keep growing, Google needs more people. Not just a few million more. Only hundreds of millions of new users will keep Google growing meaningfully. There is only one place that hundreds of millions of untapped users exist: offline.”

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Like the proposed Loon balloons, Skybox could be used to beam Internet to the roughly 4.6 billion people across the globe that still don’t have it. Internet access could benefit them — but would also benefit Google, which profits when more people see the ads that generate most of its revenue.

Upping its cloud-computing game, which trails far behind Amazon (founded by Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos), could be another goal for Google with the Skybox buy. As the Atlantic’s Robinson Meyer points out, Skybox aims to create a “cloud for Earth.” Unlike other satellite companies that sell images and information about them, Skybox wants to create a massive archive of data about the Earth that includes historical weather reports and imagery from public satellites as well as its own. Inside that data cloud, companies could experiment and run their own software.

Meyer writes in the Atlantic: