I am just honestly confused. There seem to be no logical reason for it, except that it would raise the stock value of rocket producers like SpaceX and Blue Origin.

  • jrs100000@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    12
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    17 hours ago

    So I can actually think of a few reasons: Preprocessing vast amounts of super high resolution satellite imagery to save bandwidth, and jurisdictional black site processing data some countries would want to steal or arrest you for having or processing, particularly if you were hiding it from internal audit. You would be paying an extreme premium over ground based for ever FLOP, so, the customer base of practical customers is limited to a handful of very well funded intelligence agencies or scientific projects in very niche use cases.