The satellite image, picked up by CNN and broadcast around the world, was captured not by the U.S. military but by a Silicon Valley start-up called Capella Space, founded by a 24-year-old engineer. Using 11-foot-wide mesh antennas, Capella's satellites can spot a basketball from more than 300 miles up, through cloud cover, day or night, for a fraction of the price of military systems.
As the company's founder, Payam Banazadeh, told us, Capella offered the public 'the first unclassified, open-source satellite imagery that showed the imminent invasion.' At the start of the war, news outlets used Capella's images to track Russian units all the way to Kyiv, giving ordinary people nearly the same view as the Pentagon.
Commercial technology played a crucial role in not only anticipating Putin's invasion, but also blunting it. Ukrainian forces, outmanned and outgunned, relied on an ingenious collection of start-ups to repel Russia in the early stages of the conflict.
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