The military is waking up to a key benefit of commercial satellite imagery - it’s sharable.

The best part about commercial products is that they’re not classified, Medina said. “They give users the flexibility to share commercial data with international partners.”

…Capt. Benjamin Berezin, SSC deputy branch chief, said it was “eye-opening to see partner nation imagery applications because it gave the team’s analysts new avenues to work with partners.”

Space Systems Command is trying to “showcase the benefit of commercial technology to combatant commands and partner nations,” said Col. Minpo Shiue, director of SSC’s Warfighter Integration Office.

“We expect all combatant commands to seek out this capability,” he said.

This might seem like a relatively trivial benefit but it’s not. The process of sharing classified products with foreign partners can be unbelievably tedious and time consuming. That’s not something you want to navigate during a conflict (or ever, really).

And if you think we have a lot of collective infrastructure in orbit and on ground to support this now just wait. Every soldier, analyst, business, and citizen will ultimately have and require access to space data on a daily basis much in the same way that mobile phone use has proliferated. And once that infrastructure is deployed it will have to be serviced, replenished, and upgraded. We are just getting started.