VANDENBERG AIR FORCE BASE — At 11:30am PT, an Atlas V 401 rocket carrying a very important payload launched past a threatening bank of coastal fog into clear blue California skies on Wednesday. Some 20 minutes later, the payload — a high-tech satellite — took up residence 385 miles above the Earth, where it will slowly start to change the lives of millions.

You may not have heard of this satellite, the WorldView-3, which isn't surprising considering how the company behind the launch, DigitalGlobe, has been advertising it. They'll tell you it has the fastest, highest resolution super-spectral imaging capability on the market, with 31-centimeter panchromatic resolution, 1.24 meter multispectral resolution and 3.7 meter short-wave infrared resolution.

Nerds.

Here's what they should be telling you: This is a satellite that may prevent famine in Syria by identifying ahead of time exactly how many crops are being grown now that 2 million refugees, mostly farmers, have fled the country. This is a satellite that can help firefighters, because it sees through dense smoke. It can tell you when Iran has added a new parking space outside one of its nuclear facilities.

The nerdiest satellite in history can help identify invasive species, tell the difference between limestone and sandstone, estimate the number of chickens on the planet via its chicken coops, inform cities where all their manhole covers and mailboxes are, and tell the difference between a truck and an SUV.

"If the WorldView-3 were sitting in the 'O' in the Hollywood sign," explains Rob Mitrevski, a senior VP at Digital Globe partner Exelis, "this satellite would be able to count the number of people on the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco" — 385 miles away.

No, the camera isn't quite detailed enough to see your face, despite what some scaremongering reports have said. But it will mean far more detailed, and frequently updated, Google Earth images. (Google uses DigitalGlobe's data, among others.)

Time for another nerdy detail: the WorldView-3 will send 1.2 GB of data back to Earth every second. That's faster than the fastest Wi-Fi you've ever experienced, and it means this puppy can send an extremely detailed image of everything between New York City and Washington, D.C., in just 45 seconds. It can collect and send data on an area of land the size of the U.S. every two days.

"This is a living inventory of the Earth," Dr. Kumar Navulur, DigitalGlobe's director of next generation products, told Mashable. "It will save lives and save resources. It's all about keeping a spotlight where help is needed."

That's a significant shift; until now, most of Digital Globe's customers were government agencies. But with budgets being slashed around the world, " we need to diversify," Navulur says.

He sees the satellite opening up vast new markets for the company. DigitalGlobe is already working with nonprofits and intelligence agencies; now it wants to work with cities and urban planners, geologists, biologists, oceanographers, and just about anyone else who could use this kind of detailed up-to-date data.

Though DigitalGlobe is a for-profit company, there's definitely a do-gooding aspect to what it does. It isn't afraid to lose clients if the situation warrants it. For instance, it used to work with Russian agencies. Those checks stopped when DigitalGlobe publicly released pictures of the troop buildup on the border with Ukraine.

"That was the right thing to do," insists Navulur.

The most detailed information won't come online for another six months; that's when NOAA officially relaxes its regulations that prevent DigitalGlobe from sending pictures at a greater than 50-centimeter-per-pixel resolution.

But after that, the only problem is how we're going to crunch all this new information on our fast-changing home planet. As Navulur complains: "There are not enough eyeballs on Earth to be looking at all this data."