AS SILICON VALLEY TRIES TO ENLIST, THE PENTAGON STRANGLES INNOVATION
STEVE BLANKAPRIL 15, 2022
Looking at a satellite image of Ukraine online, I realized it was from Capella Space — one of our Hacking for Defense student teams who now have seven satellites in orbit. Hacking for Defense is a university course I and others created to connect students interested in learning lean innovation methods to solve the toughest national-security challenges.
They’re not the only startup in this fight. An entire wave of new startups and scaleups are providing satellite imagery and analysis, satellite communications, and unmanned aerial vehicles supporting Ukraine’s struggle.
For decades, satellites that took detailed pictures of Earth were only available to governments and the high-resolution images were classified. Today, commercial companies have their own satellites providing unclassified imagery. The government buys and distributes commercial images from startups to supplement their own and shares them with Ukraine as part of a broader intelligence-sharing arrangement that the head of Defense Intelligence Agency described as “revolutionary.”
https://warontherocks.com/2022/04/as-silicon-valley-tries-to-enlist-the-pentagon-strangles-innovation/
