In February 2025, a startup satellite manufacturer, Albedo (Broomfield, CO, USA) is expected to launch its first satellite, Clarity-1, into orbit aboard SpaceX’s Transporter-13, a Falcon 9 rideshare mission [1]. Like many imaging satellites, Clarity-1’s mission will be to take high-resolution aerial photos for clients in various economic sectors including agriculture, insurance, energy, mapping, utilities, and defense. What makes this satellite unique is both its industry-leading 10 cm spatial resolution and its extremely low orbit of 200 km, far closer to Earth than the 450 km or higher orbits of most of its peers with similar missions.

The power of a satellite’s optical camera is usually expressed as the length of the smallest feature it can resolve, with the resolution of early satellite cameras measured in tens of meters. Technological advances have brought that unit down to tens of centimeters, making newer images hundreds of times more revealing. Clarity-1’s 10 cm spatial resolution will be nine times better than its nearest competitors.

While the higher resolution promises to provide valuable data to the commercial entities and government agencies that are already lining up as Albedo’s customers, it also raises concerns about privacy [2]. “We are getting another step closer to a world where an all-seeing Big Brother is watching,” said Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, MA, USA, and editor of The Space Report, a widely read monthly internet publication covering civilian and military space developments.

For decades, national security considerations and exorbitant costs meant that the highest-resolution satellites belonged exclusively to the militaries of the world’s most powerful countries. That strangle hold began to crack in 1986 when Landsat, a nonmilitary American satellite built by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to monitor crops with 30 m resolution, took pictures of Chernobyl, showing that the reactor’s core had been breached and that it was emitting radioactive debris into the atmosphere [3]. Its photographs, taken from an altitude of 650 km, confirmed that Russian officials had been minimizing the extent of the incident. It also shined a giant spotlight on orbiting satellites’ capacity to catch revealing glimpses of any location on the planet.

It took until 1994, however, for the United States to approve the commercial use of American spy satellite technology [4]. In 1999, Space Imaging (Thornton, CO, USA), a subsidiary of US defense contractors Raytheon (Arlington, VA, USA) and Lockheed Martin (Bethesda, MD, USA), launched IKONOS, the first satellite intended specifically for commercial use with a 1 m resolution rivaling that of military spy satellite technology at the time [5]. The market for satellite imaging globally, currently estimated at between 4.2 billion and 5.7 billion USD, is expected to more than double in the next decade [6], [7], [8], [9].

Until December 2021, when the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the agency that regulates commercial satellites in the United States, granted Albedo a license to sell its 10 cm resolution imaging, the US federal limit on the resolution of images produced by commercial satellites was 25 cm, a figure that NOAA relaxed from 50 cm in 2014 [10]. In 2020, to spur economic growth, the US Department of Commerce, working through NOAA, revised the regulations to a three-tiered licensing approach. Tier One includes few restrictions and covers imaging similar to what is already commercially available in other countries [10], [11], [12]. Tier Two includes more restrictions and covers constellations with imaging capabilities similar to those available only from other US sources. The most powerful civilian imaging satellites now in operation can discern objects on the ground as small as 30 cm, enough resolving power to make out road markings and tail numbers on airplanes [2]. Only a handful of commercial operators—Airbus (Leiden, the Netherlands), Maxar (Westminster, CO, USA), ImageSat International (Or Yehuda, Israel), and SI Imaging Services (Daejeon, Republic of Korea)—have satellites in orbit today that can capture images with 30 cm resolution [13]; imaging with 50 cm resolution is more widely available. Albedo falls into Tier Three, which includes companies with novel capabilities. This tier comes with yet more restrictions. In a national emergency, for example, national intelligence directors can claim imagery Albedo collects over designated areas during certain time windows and prevent the company from selling that imagery to others [14].

The next frontier for commercial satellite imagery is 10 cm resolution. This resolution heretofore has only been achieved by military satellites, which can cost well over 1 billion USD to develop, manufacture, and launch [15]. To be commercially viable, however, the cost of 10 cm resolution imaging must be much cheaper. One way to reduce costs is to use less expensive cameras and telescopes, which means launching satellites into very low Earth orbit (vLEO), an orbital band spanning altitudes below 400 km. Previous vLEO missions include the European Space Agency’s Gravity Field and Steady-State Ocean Circulation Explorer, which mapped Earth’s gravity from 2009 to 2013 while operating at an altitude of about 255 km, and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Super Low Altitude Test Satellite, which flew between 2017 and 2019 carrying sensors and a camera at 167 km [16].

Among the companies looking to operate in vLEO is the China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation, a key player in China’s defense sector, which in 2024 launched the first four of a planned 300 vLEO satellites that will orbit at altitudes between 150 and 300 km by 2030 [17]. Earth Observant (Louisville, CO, USA) is planning a constellation of 60 Stingray satellites designed for five year lifespans at 250 km. Each Stingray will capture near real-time 15 cm high-resolution imagery [18]. Skeyeon (San Diego, CA, USA) is developing a constellation of small satellites to provide high-resolution daily Earth imagery from an altitude of about 250 km [18]. Other companies planning vLEO satellite operations are the Aerospace Corporation (El Segundo, CA, USA), Kreios Space (Barcelona, Spain), Phase Four (Hawthorne, CA, USA), Redwire (Jacksonville, FL, USA), and Thales Alenia Space (Canne, France) [18].

Albedo, however, stands out among the competition eyeing vLEO for winning US regulatory approval to sell the 10 cm resolution imaging from its Clarity satellites [19]. In addition to using less expensive optics, Albedo cuts costs by using smaller launchers and employing commercially available equipment without the radiation-hardened electronics necessary for operation in higher orbits. Other benefits for Albedo when operating in vLEO are that traveling closer to ground stations reduces the power demand for radio transmissions, which eliminates the need for large, wing-like solar panels jutting out from the main body of the satellite—its panels instead cover the body (Fig. 1).

In addition, because debris and nonfunctional satellites in vLEO naturally reenter Earth’s upper atmosphere and safely disintegrate, typically in a matter of days, the risk of collision among satellites [20], [21], [22] compared with those in higher orbits is significantly reduced [23]. “It is getting awfully crowded at 500 km,” McDowell said. “SpaceX has moved a bunch of their Starlink satellites lower, partly because they are worried about the collision risk from all the Chinese satellites in that orbit maneuvering without telling them.”

There are, however, additional challenges associated with vLEO. Satellites in lower orbits have relatively small communication windows with ground stations. They also need advanced coatings and materials for protection against heat generated by atmospheric drag and corrosion caused by atomic oxygen present in the upper atmosphere, sophisticated orbital management strategies to deal with variations in atmospheric density, and materials that can withstand going from day to night every 45 min or so [23].

Albedo’s Clarity-1 is the size of a full-size refrigerator (about 3 m tall and 1 m wide), much larger than many other commercial Earth observation satellites operating even at higher altitudes. Making the satellite so heavy provides stability but at the cost of increased atmospheric drag. The company’s satellites have been designed to counteract this drag using ultra-efficient electric propulsion from ion engines [23]. “Ion engines have a low thrust, but you can run them pretty much all the time, and they get a lot of miles per gallon,” McDowell said. Albedo’s plans call for a constellation—called Clarity—of 24 spacecraft that would offer five revisits per day to every location on Earth; in addition to 10-cm resolution for optical imagery, the satellites will offer a resolution of 2 m for thermal imagery (Fig. 2) [24].

There appears to be quite a demand for Albedo’s forthcoming services. Among the company’s initial clients are the US military and the nation’s intelligence agencies. In 2022, the US Air Force awarded Albedo a 1.25 million USD contract to evaluate its 2 m thermal imaging system for nighttime conditions [25]. In April 2023, the company received an additional 1.25 million USD for this work from the US National Air and Space Intelligence Center, which assesses foreign threats [26]. In late 2023, it signed a contract to have its technology evaluated by the US National Reconnaissance Office, which runs the nation’s spy satellites [27].

In addition to the government contracts, as of early 2024 Albedo had attracted nearly 100 million USD in private investment [28]. The company has already pre-sold much of Clarity-1’s imaging time over its first two years in operation to customers such as city planners readying construction projects, conservation groups tracking wildlife, and insurance companies assessing damage claims [1]. Many of these clients are looking to add to or, in some cases, replace imaging currently done by planes and drones. Though these craft can collect better images than satellites ever will, they are limited in where they can go. While the US Federal Aviation Administration forbids flying commercial drones over groups of people, and mandates “no-fly” zones that include airports, military bases, and sporting events, it applies no such rules to satellites [29].

Albedo’s website claims its imagery can help governments “monitor hotspots, eliminate uncertainty, and mobilize with speed” [30]. In a blog post highlighting the observational powers of his company’s fleet, Winston Tri, an Albedo co-founder, indicated that the satellites’ cameras could detect details such as a car’s sunroof and racing stripes and items in a flatbed truck. “In some cases,” Tri wrote, “we may even be able to identify particular vehicles, which has not been possible up to this point” [31].

The unprecedented resolution has some worried about what viewers with malicious intent might be able to observe. “Going down to 10 cm does raise more privacy issues—you can start to kind of see individual people,” McDowell said. Even if the imagery cannot resolve people’s faces, he said, the technology is good enough that, combined with context cues such as which buildings a person enters and when, it can be used to track individuals’ locations. To address the risk of privacy violations, Albedo claims it will approve new customers on a case-by-case basis, develop ways to identify malicious intent, and make sure its contract terms and conditions spell out punitive measures for breaching company policy [2].

Others believe that the concerns about privacy may be overblown. Kevin Pomfret, chair of the unmanned systems team and co-chair of the data protection and cybersecurity team at the law firm Williams Mullen (Richmond, VA, USA), sees nothing special about data collected by high-resolution satellites operating in vLEO. “I do not think that there are many, if any, additional privacy concerns that arise because of satellites in vLEO as compared to other platforms that collect imagery or other types of data,” Pomfret said. “That could be from satellites in LEO or crude aircraft, drones, or sensors on the ground collecting location information or pictures of faces like through home security technologies that we see and use every day.”