This orbit type allows the satellite to pass over the entirety of Earth once per day at the same time, so the light conditions look the same The satellites do, of course, need to be told what to do, and that all comes down to four people in one room.

So this is our mission operations, uh, control, uh, center.

This is where we fly the five satellites on orbit, and really inside this room is what we consider our time-dominant, uh, real-time activities from choosing, making the final choices of what images we're going to collect in the next several minutes, uh, to the next several hours.

What makes Digital Globe, for example, run are those five satellites, and to get those to space, to the place where they make money, they had to put them on rockets, which tend to, from time to time, blow up.

It's always a little bit of a nail-biter as you come up to a launch.

We put, um, an enormous capital investment into the satellites and the launch vehicle, and it all comes down to a one-hour event, lifting off from the ground and going into orbit.

And that's a, that can be a little bit of a nerve-wracking period, but certainly very exciting all at the same time.