Planet Labs aims to push forward peace around the world by shining a luminous spotlight from space on the movement of tanks, troops, missiles and warships across the Earth’s surface. Shown here is its headquarters in San Francisco (Photo By Michael Macor/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)

San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images

Hyper-tech sensor satellites are changing wars by bringing their imagery to citizens worldwide, in real time, even as these spacecraft become potential targets of attack by irate combatants.

Like all-seeing angels circling the globe, high-resolution imagery satellites operated by Planet Labs and Vantor/Maxar have been charting the great conflicts being waged between autocrats and democrats from Ukraine to Iran, says Brian Hurley, the founder of New Space Economy, a think tank and digital magazine that chronicles the fusion of space technologies with national security and defense operations, while changing both of these sectors in the process.

Canada-based Hurley told me in an interview the war scene imagery being beamed across the globe by Planet Labs and other operators of leading-edge satellites is making these military campaigns the most widely observed in human history.

In a fascinating new report he wrote titled “The Role of Satellite Services in the 2026 US-Iran War,” Hurley devotes an entire chapter to “Commercial Satellites and the Transparent Battlefield.”

He sketches out how the continuous, astounding coverage, from hundreds of kilometers above the planet, that the most advanced Western constellations, along with satellites controlled by Iran’s space-power partners, is providing “all sides near-real-time battlefield transparency.”

In the days and weeks following the joint American-Israeli launch of airstrikes against Iran, he says, viewers across the continents began “watching the campaign unfold not just through news reports but through satellite photographs made available almost in real time by commercial providers like Planet Labs and Vantor, formerly Maxar Intelligence.”

“That visible layer of space-based surveillance was only the most publicly apparent dimension of how satellites shaped this war.”

“Below what imagery providers posted on the internet lay a deeper architecture of military communications, precision navigation, electronic warfare, and information denial,” Hurley adds, “that proved as consequential as any bomb or missile.”

“The conflict that began on February 28 was, at its foundations, fought as much in orbit as over the Persian Gulf.”

The rulers of Iran were so alarmed that their citizenry could follow the conflict play-by-play via satellite-captured photographs that, after imposing a nationwide internet blackout, they began a multi-front assault on the broadband-beaming SpaceX Starlink system, and on the possessors of SpaceX terminals that had been smuggled into the Islamic Republic, all while publicizing the death sentences that could await those arrested, Hurley told me.

While Tehran’s state-controlled media blasted out stories on the glorious victories its forces were winning against the U.S. and Israel, Planet Labs published, day after day, before and after photos of Iran’s devastated uranium enrichment facilities and missile launch sites that had been hit with massive ground-penetrating warheads.

“In the 1991 Gulf War,” Hurley says in the report, “only state actors with classified reconnaissance programs could observe the battlefield from orbit with any resolution worth using.”

“By 2026, any organization willing to pay a commercial subscription fee – or sometimes any person with internet access – could obtain high-resolution imagery of military targets within hours of their being struck.”

Planet Labs, he adds, “became one of the primary sources of visual documentation for Operation Epic Fury.”

“Its imagery revealed smoke rising above Tehran, burning vessels at the Konarak naval base in southern Iran, cratered runways at Iranian air facilities, and destroyed underground missile tunnel entrances in the mountains of northern Iran.”

Because Planet’s images were then available to any subscriber - the San Francisco-based outfit has since tightly restricted the release of some imagery - top leaders in the U.S. and in Iran could not only view this coverage at the same time, but also knew their adversaries had simultaneous access to the same archives.

“This mutual surveillance,” Hurley says, likely shaped the lead-up to the war, and how it unfolded, “in ways that are difficult to fully reconstruct.”

Planet Labs similarly provided play-by-play coverage of Russia’s invasion of democratic Ukraine, starting from the massing of Russian tanks and troops along its borderlands, crushing any chance of a surprise attack.

The Kremlin, infuriated, began sending high-ranking envoys to UN gatherings to threaten that Russia could begin shooting down any Western satellites aiding Ukraine.

“Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and the wars now unfolding across the Middle East, are among the most documented armed conflicts in history,” Hurley told me.

“In Ukraine, commercial imagery helped show the Russian troop buildup before the February 2022 invasion and then became part of daily public reporting.”

“The public can now see very high-quality commercial imagery, including 30 centimeter-class products.”

While common citizens can now view wartime satellite photographs once restricted to top-echelon government and military leaders, he says, the U.S. president still has access to a much richer treasure trove of imagery and intelligence.

“Presidential briefings are not based on commercial photos alone. The President’s Daily Brief is an all-source intelligence product that combines information and analysis from across the intelligence community.”

“That means the president may receive classified satellite imagery, signals intelligence, human intelligence, and other material the public never sees.”

Even with the democratization of access to high-resolution satellite images, there remains “a real access gap.”

“Public access to commercial imagery can be delayed, filtered, licensed, or legally restricted.”

“Commercial satellite imagery has brought the public much closer to the visual intelligence picture than in earlier conflicts,” he says, “but not to parity with what is available in U.S. presidential intelligence briefings.”

Meanwhile, Hurley says the exploding uses of satellites in the Ukraine and Iran conflicts point toward the technological wars of the future, when skirmishes extend from terrestrial battlefields to celestial conflict zones.

“The Ukraine and Iran wars,” he says, are “terrestrial conflicts with a major space-enabled dimension.”

“Satellites now support communications, navigation, reconnaissance, targeting workflows, and battle damage assessment, which means military effects on the ground are often partly dependent on space systems.”

“In Ukraine, open reporting shows satellite connectivity was tied directly to drone operations and artillery fire control, while in Iran commercial satellite imagery has made strike damage visible almost immediately to the wider public.”

“It is likely that the Department of Defense and the wider U.S. intelligence system are using commercial satellite imagery, potentially including Planet imagery, as one input in battle damage assessments,” he adds.

Under a series of government and military contracts,“Planet also publicly serves defense and intelligence customers.”

Hurley says in his recent report that satellite surveillance of Iran’s uranium enrichment sites has helped the U.S. track Tehran’s overall nuclear program, including sporadic info on the location of its near-weapons-grade uranium.

Could this imagery have a high enough resolution to determine whether any uranium canisters had been moved from any of these sites after Operation Midnight Hammer and before the new wave of attacks?

“Probably not with enough confidence to say so from publicly available imagery alone,” Hurley says.

“Commercial satellite imagery is very good at showing damage to buildings, tunnel entrances, craters, vehicles, earthmoving, and other visible surface changes, but identifying whether specific uranium canisters were moved is a much higher bar.”

“Planet’s widely used PlanetScope imagery is about 3 meters resolution, which is useful for broad site monitoring rather than identifying small objects.”

“Planet’s higher-resolution SkySat imagery is 50 centimeter per pixel, which can show vehicles and larger surface objects more clearly.”

“Even higher-end commercial imagery from Vantor/Maxar is in the 30 centimeter class.”

“That means analysts may be able to detect signs consistent with movement, such as trucks, loading activity, new tracks, disturbed ground, or changes around storage entrances, but not reliably confirm from imagery alone that a given object was a uranium canister or whether it contained uranium.”

“Public satellite imagery might show indications that material or equipment was moved,” Hurley told me, “but it would not usually be strong enough on its own to prove that uranium canisters were moved between strikes.”

“That kind of judgment would normally require a wider intelligence picture, including inspections, signals, other sensors, or human reporting.”

Hurley also outlined, in his study, the ongoing use of satellites to track the leadership compounds in Tehran, so I asked him if this imagery is of a high enough resolution to identify individual leaders.

Or could it be good enough to identify the particular car used by any given leader, even from orbit?

“No,” he says, “publicly available commercial satellite imagery is generally not sharp enough to reliably identify individual leaders as specific people from low Earth orbit.”

“It is, however, often good enough to detect vehicles, convoy patterns, and repeated activity at leadership compounds, especially with 30 cm-class or 50 cm-class imagery.”

“What it usually cannot do from imagery alone is confirm that a particular car belongs to a particular leader without other supporting intelligence.”

Meanwhile, Will Marshall, Planet Labs co-founder and CEO, told me in an earlier interview that his outfit’s mapping war crimes committed by the Russian invaders across Ukraine is part of Planet’s campaign to end the war by chronicling its atrocities.

Marshall, an Oxford-educated physicist who’s been a longtime opponent of positioning any weaponry in orbit, says Planet aims to push forward peace around the world by shining a luminous spotlight from space on the movement of tanks, troops, missiles and warships across the Earth’s surface.

He told me that the entire global stage can now be photographed in high resolution from low Earth orbit, where Planet’s 200 satellites now fly, which will ultimately eliminate the potential to launch a surprise invasion of a neighboring country.

“With imaging of Ukraine and Russia everyday,” he says, “you can’t hide these military build-ups.”

This shrinking ability to camouflage preparations for a lightning attack on an unsuspecting target populace, Marshall predicts, could cut into the prospects of war across the globe and into the future.

Across its myriad missions, Marshall adds, “Planet aims to have a positive impact on peace around the world.”