War is getting harder to hide from space

May 19, 2026

5 min read

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War is getting harder to hide from space

Commercial satellites can now watch much of Earth in near-real time. Militaries are learning new ways to fool them

By Sarah Scoles edited by Eric Sullivan

Apparent strike damage at Iran's naval base in Konarak on March 1 was captured by a commercial satellite.

Planet Labs PBC

The day after the U.S. and Israel began the current war with Iran, satellite company Planet Labs e-mailed a media release. “Sharing our first batch of areas impacted by airstrikes,” it read. Planet operates a constellation of about 200 satellites that together can take pictures of much of Earth—including the parts in turmoil—daily. The release included a link to images taken that day of collapsed tunnels at a missile base and smoke over a naval facility.

As Planet’s message illustrates, governments, journalists and ordinary observers alike can now see what is happening across the globe soon after it happens, thanks to infrastructure in space. This relatively new ability is a result of the proliferation of “remote-sensing” satellites like Planet’s, which look down at Earth constantly.

Planet’s hundreds of remote-sensing spacecraft share the sky with hundreds more, and together they’re pushing society toward what has been called the GEOINT singularity: a time when geospatial intelligence will be available in real time to the average person, who will be able to see not just what the world looks like but how it is changing. The world hasn’t quite reached that tipping point. But merely approaching it has changed warfare for good.

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The U.S. government has operated spy satellites since the late 1950s, but it wasn’t until 1992 that private companies got the go-ahead to operate their own. Today commercial remote-sensing satellites are ubiquitous: Igor Morić of Princeton University, whose research includes ways for satellites to be used in arms control, calculates that with their combined powers as a “superconstellation,” they could image every spot on the planet every few hours.

Some of the sharpest eyes in the sky belong to a company called Vantor, whose satellites can resolve objects the size of a cutting board from orbit. Its 10 satellites can’t cover the globe in the same way Planet’s hundreds can, but they can return to high-priority spots 15 times a day and deliver pictures in as little as 15 minutes. Vantor has also used its data to make 2D and 3D maps of most of the world, updated the same day new intelligence arrives.

The U.S. and allied governments that Vantor does business with want what CEO Dan Smoot calls “their living globe”—“so they can see their world updated in real time and can see anything that’s changing within that world,” he says. But private satellites don’t just take pictures anymore: they can detect a variety of wavelengths and carry instruments such as radar and devices that can pick up radio transmissions, presenting a rapidly refreshed view of the planet beyond what the human eye can perceive.

> Even as Earth approaches the GEOINT singularity, truth and transparency don’t always win out.

One company working with these nonvisual signals is HawkEye 360, which uses 30 satellites to detect and pinpoint radio transmissions. It can revisit most places every hour or so. “It’s one of those modalities that you can’t fully hide from,” says Todd Probert, HawkEye’s chief operating officer. That’s particularly useful for tracking ships, something people have been interested in doing in the Strait of Hormuz, where the conflict with Iran choked off oil shipping.

Ships that want to go invisible may turn off their automated identification systems or spoof their GPS location so—magic!—they appear to be somewhere they’re not. But they can’t hide all their radio transmissions, such as the ones radar systems beam out. HawkEye’s satellites can pick up those beams and triangulate a position—then, maybe with help from satellites that take pictures, confirm who’s out there.

HawkEye’s spacecraft can also sense GPS disruption, showing military officials where someone is jamming or spoofing a signal to make traditional geolocation and navigation unreliable.

With so many kinds of satellites, the prevailing logic goes, it has become much harder to conceal military activity aboveground. Going underground can obscure the action, but it’s hard to wage an entire war from a bunker.

As the Planet press release shows, near-real-time