Remember what GPS looked like in the late '90s? The Global Positioning System was a strategic asset controlled by the US government, which limited spatial resolution available to civilians. Well-heeled consumers could choose among a handful of expensive, under-designed receivers, but for most people, the benefit wasn't worth the expense. Today, of course, GPS is ubiquitous. Every car, cellphone, or computer can track its location, fostering an ecosystem of goods and services that help people locate what they need, when they need it, anywhere on Earth.

Skybox Imaging is building a new kind of imaging satellite.

Skybox Imaging is betting that satellite imagery circa 2012 is like GPS location circa 1998. The market for detailed pictures of the earth's surface is growing, but satellite imagery's public-sector legacy makes it impractical many potential uses. For some purposes, it's not timely enough: Google Earth's display can be several years out of date. For others, it's too costly: Commercial users can pay exorbitant sums for crucial intelligence — $2000-$3000 per task plus $5-$30 per square kilometer of coverage — only to be preempted by government priorities. Upshot: Satellite photo applications that could revolutionize existing industries and create new ones never even reach the paper napkin stage.

Skybox aims to crack open this latent market. "Our secret sauce is the ability to integrate what's in the sky and on the ground, and solve the last-mile problem of distribution," says Adam Wegel, VP of marketing.

Starting in late 2012, the 55-person company based in Mountain View, California, will launch a private constellation designed to deliver orbital photos as a service: Just log in, enter a credit card number, and grab a timely shot of any spot on Earth. Unlike Google, Bing, or MapQuest, Skybox images will be updated every eight hours. (There are indications that the company's plans are more ambitious: one-hour temporal resolution, video, and the ability to specify a path, although Wegel didn't mention these capabilities when we spoke.) The company views its system as a platform, like an iPhone, on which developers can build next-gen commercial and consumer applications. "You'll be able to build apps for monitoring oil and gas pipelines," Wegel says, "or for financial trading, where they're starting use imagery to predict stock prices."

The key to Skybox's strategy is a different approach to building satellites. Conventional imaging sats are designed for government work. They cost $800 million each. They occupy the volume of an SUV and weigh two tons, take five years to build and stay in orbit for a decade. Skybox believes that's overkill for commercial applications. It's using off-the-shelf parts and open-source software to build birds the size of a mini-fridge that weigh 200 pounds, so they can be lofted cheaply and upgraded every few years.

"We want to bring Moore's Law into space," Wegel says, "to take advantage of a shorter development cycle, higher processing power, and more affordable cost curve." Unlike government-spec imagery, which must be detailed enough to fire a missile down an elevator shaft, Skybox's spatial resolution will be a yard or less, enough to count cars in a parking lot.

This is a risky bet in a market that's still smarting from the spectacular failure of Iridium's satellite phone network early in the millennium. Iridium's costs proved too high for a market that never materialized. Likewise, Skybox faces substantial challenges. A new photo every eight hours may not be frequent enough (though that's a function of the number of sats in the sky). The company's designs may turn out to be more costly to implement and deploy than projections indicate, and the market for a satellite imaging platform will be impossible to gauge until the first 12 satellites are up. Wegel admits that Skybox's demand forecast is a "leap of faith." That may explain the lack of competitors in the market.

Still, a number of established trends are working in Skybox's favor: Private-enterprise aerospace, contract manufacturing, geolocation, mobile computing, data analytics, platform business dynamics, and of course Moore's Law itself. The company has built a strong team made up of seasoned aerospace and Silicon Valley vets. Its first birds will take flight in late 2012. Then we'll see what's really happening on the ground in Mountain View.