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by dweekly 2129 days ago
Generally speaking, mapping out an area in high quality requires imagery that was captured not only relatively close to the subject (flying at a few thousand feet vs on orbit) as well as capturing objects from multiple oblique angles. This requires intensively flying a "waffle fries" pattern over a subject area of interest with a plane with a bunch of cameras on it pointing in multiple direction. E.g. https://www.sanborn.com/oblique-imagery/

So - many orders of magnitude more expensive than just capturing satellite imagery.