Paradigm shift cooking in sub-meter space telescope…

While internet mega-constellations undesired impact dominate astronomy discourse, a quieter revo-lution in Earth Observation (EO) is in full motion. Feeding from the new satellite commodity echo-system, bold entrepreneurs are committed to bring space-based optical observation to the masses. Heightened international tensions also encouraging intelligence imagery independence, startups and legacy suppliers are now engaged in large-aperture high-resolution or wide-field multi-detectors tele-scope-camera systems. Using relevant project examples, we explore how modern private EO satellites could perform if pointed toward deep-space and review the compromises needed to get to the price point enabling investor’s business cases. This surge of new funding in technologies highly relevant to astronomy instrumentation is changing the space access equation. We aim to demonstrate how these advances directly benefit candidate astronomy missions such as POET, TWINKLE, and CASTOR.