[frandroid]

It's not impossible that the Pentagon could have thought "alright, we want these readings. is there a civilian use for this kind of data and decided to see if a civilian project could be sprung up... Though that's more of a Cold War conceit. These days they would just do it themselves, it's probably an easy and cheap project.

[robocat]

Just as there are commercial earth imagery satellites, I would expect there are commercial RF source detection satellites. There are obvious sales channels to hedge funds, countries, militaries, and commercial transmission operators (searching for causes of interference).

Hedge funds is the fun one: detecting economic activity and growth (independent of official government figures).