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SLAs, perhaps - and more broadly, the notion that even reasonable SLAs means $$$$$$, while non-SLA means $$$$ but basically best-effort and costs significantly less.

So for example non-SLA "once a week" might really mean "once a week except if any of these 4 million other things take precedence" and translate to intervals being skipped on a regular basis, photos being days or weeks old, etc. SLA'd once-a-week would really be once a week and not a second late, but truly prohibitively expensive.

I'm reminded of the early US telephone systems in the 60s and 70s around WWII etc where Important People could pick up a phone and always get a connection even if that booted off a few tens or hundreds of calls on a shared trunk in the call path. Satellite is like an order-of magnitude-worse version of that problem because of the associated eye-watering costs and subsequent plain old near-zero availability.




SLAs are difficult with satellites since you generally can't guarantee you'll be able to produce imagery due to weather.


Depends - is the business model operating satellites on a fixed orbit (a full scan of the planet every week, say) and selling the images?

Or are we thinking of a satellite that can actually be targeted at things on demand - selling time or fuel?




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