What is Max? The satellite company that shows the horrors of the war in Ukraine

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The latest case is that of the mass graves in

.

Before there were those from

, but also the armored column towards Kiev, the Moskva and many others, from the days before the

.

satellite photos

are a common thread that runs parallel to the

.

He reveals unpublished details, discusses or simply reports with a point of view (in every way) different from everyone in the wars of the past.

But who are the guys at Maxar and where does the space imaging company that has become so influential since February 24 come from?

Maxar

is a private company but also a US government contractor, in fact, as it defines itself, it is an "

, providing satellite imagery and intelligence, as well as spacecraft and robotics for space exploration, research and national security".

Maxar image of Mariupol theater destroyed by Russian forces.AP

It is a publicly traded company and is based in

.

Technically, it was born in 2017 from the merger of some other companies in the sector: the Canadian Mda and the American

.

The latter has a very long history behind it, beginning in the early nineties of the 20th century, when the Clinton administration authorized individuals to enter a world of collecting and marketing satellite images, until then reserved to military.

, the name of the company before it became DigitalGlobe, is a familiar name to anyone who has spent any time playing around with

.

The company forged very close ties with the US government with very lucrative contracts.

These ties (and these contracts) have passed to

.

However,

is not the only company in the sector.

There are many competitors, such as

,

,

,

.

These companies are central to the work of the open source intelligence community (for short:

) and the most famous example in the Bellingcat reporters' collective.

However, compared to the others,

has two more cards.

, which made it so visible and known to an audience not only of professionals, is -let's say-

.

In 2017

created its

.

An initiative, with dedicated staff, that disseminates and promotes its images in the media around the world, from press agencies, websites, newspapers and TV.

Before the

, according to the company, the most famous event was the withdrawal of the United States from Afghanistan with the chaos at the Kabul airport: more than 700 news websites around the world used

material .

A record destined to be revised upwards due to the interest achieved with the

of

.

Russian forces convoy in Belarus. AFP

The second ace in

's pocket is technological.

Satellite photos, especially in a chaotic scenario such as an armed conflict, are all the more valuable the more detailed they are.

The interpretation of images taken from space is always very delicate and in the past has led to sensational errors, as in the case of Saddam's alleged chemical weapons bunkers, whose "smoking gun" - said the Bush administration at the time - was (also) in satellite photos.

Later, the evidence turned out to be false.

Compared to 2003, the technology has come a long way.

And while satellite photos must always be corroborated with other evidence, to be collected on the ground as the

did in the Bucha case, eyes in the sky go to 12-inch detail.

does it even better: for more than 2 years it has been offering

.

The duplicity of the definition is achieved thanks to the resampling of the data collected with a resolution of 30 cm from the constellation of

and

satellites of the same

.

It is a technology that uses artificial intelligence and a complex mathematical model to increase the resolution and extract (automatically or as an aid to human work) significant spatial information.

has

and every day 4 million square kilometers of high-resolution images end up on its servers.

"It is the first

in which commercial satellite imagery can play a significant role in providing information," said Mykhailo Fedorov, the young Ukrainian deputy prime minister at the start of the

.

So it was and the role of private companies like

, their ability to guide the public agenda with objective data (images) but also with subjective choices (where to watch the satellites, which images to release to the press and which not) will become an issue not secondary in the geopolitics of the 21st century.

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