Why the Feds Appreciate Private Satellite Images of Russia's Invasion of Ukraine

pcmag.com:

The US government takes a back seat to nobody in its ability to take high-resolution photos of Earth from space, but sometimes a private company’s imaging cubesats can be more helpful to Washington than the National Reconnaissance Office’s(Opens in a new window) (NRO) high-powered satellites.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine made that especially apparent, three federal officials said Thursday during a panel at satellite-imagery firm Planet Labs PBC’s Explore 2023 conference(Opens in a new window).

The single biggest advantage: Unlike the output of the NRO’s fleet—so strictly classified that observers have had to guess at those satellites’ attributes(Opens in a new window) by poring over the agency’s mission patches(Opens in a new window)—commercial imagery doesn’t come with any top-secret stamp.

“That is helping to hold Russia to account for their actions,” said Pete Muend, director of the NRO’s Commercial Systems Program Office. “It can go places, to partners and allies where sometimes we have a little more difficulty.”

The lack of any sort of government stamp on privately sourced images can also help on the public-diplomacy front by providing “an independent source of imagery, of information showing exactly what the US government was seeing,” said Audrey Schaffer, director for space policy at the National Security Council(Opens in a new window). 

(Left unsaid was how US satellite reconnaissance photos were used to sell the Iraq War(Opens in a new window) in 2003 on false grounds.)

“In this era of misinformation and disinformation, the more independent voices out there, the better,” she said, adding that most widely circulated photos documenting such costs of Russia’s invasion as mass graves didn’t didn’t come from