An intelligence analyst receives a tip that a high-value target will move through a specific location. They task an imaging satellite, which then collects an image when the window arrives. Then the analyst waits.

Unless the analyst’s organization has a dedicated ground station, the wait will typically take 90 minutes or more for cloud-based delivery of that satellite image (also referred to as latency). In 90 minutes, the intelligence might still be useful. Anything longer than that, and it probably isn't useful for these time-sensitive missions. The target has moved. The opportunity has closed.

Speed isn't just a performance metric. It determines whether space-based intelligence can support time-sensitive operations at all. Since most customers don’t have a dedicated ground station, reducing cloud-based delivery timelines is critical for many defense, intelligence, and disaster response missions.

Vantor’s engineering teams recently hit a latency breakthrough: In early-stage testing of our next-generation WorldView™ Access offering, we've been consistently delivering rapid satellite imagery in 15 minutes or less and as fast as 11 minutes.

This isn't a one-time test result. It's repeatable performance across multiple geographies that gets us closer to real-time intelligence. Many people tend to focus on on-orbit processing as the biggest opportunity to reduce latency. But this success has proven that addressing inefficiencies on the ground can deliver a 75%+ latency improvement.

How Space-Based Intelligence is Collected and Delivered

Traditional satellite imagery collection and production workflows, also known as geospatial intelligence (GEOINT), involve four key steps:

1. After the satellite collects a new image, it downlinks raw data to a ground antenna.
2. From there, the data is backhauled to a central production facility, which is often hundreds or thousands of miles away.
3. The data enters a centralized production pipeline to produce the image itself, where it competes for processing resources with every other collection from the constellation.
4. After production, it is sent to the final storage bucket, which may or may not be on a server that is close to the customer’s operations.

The time between each step adds up quickly. If the satellite operator has a limited number of available ground stations, it may take hours for the satellite to reach the next ground station access window. The backhaul step can take 15-30 minutes, depending on distance and network conditions. The centralized factory adds more—not because the processing itself is slow, but because urgent collections wait in line behind everything else.

Some providers measure their delivery time to when the image reaches a storage bucket, but don't account for the customer's final data transfer, which can add significant time in bandwidth-constrained locations.

Building a Faster Production Pipeline

To eliminate this inefficiency, the VantorTM WorldView Access engineering team focused on building out a cloud-native production process that can deploy anywhere and support real-time missions.

• Moving production to the edge. We’ve eliminated the backhaul step entirely by engineering processing systems that interoperate with every major antenna provider’s cloud-based infrastructure. The data is processed where it lands, saving significant time from data transfer alone. It also ensures that we deliver the final intelligence to a server that’s close to the customer—something not all providers can do.
• Creating dedicated processing capacity. The traditional centralized, high-volume production factories are optimized for throughput. They’re built to process the maximum number of collections across an entire constellation. That's the right design for certain use cases. But urgent collections don't need to be part of that volume. We built lightweight, purpose-built pipelines specifically for time-sensitive tasking. Urgent collections no longer wait in the queue.
• Upgrading the processing architecture. Many production systems were designed years ago, when connectivity wasn’t what it is today. We rebuilt the processing pipeline using transform-based methods that convert raw data to finished products on the fly rather than through traditional batch processing. It's faster because it's fundamentally simpler—we stripped out everything that wasn't essential to producing intelligence-ready imagery.

A Global-Scale Integrated Ground Network

These improvements build on infrastructure and engineering work that's been ongoing for years. We’ve built relationships with several major antenna providers globally and have done the integration work to interoperate with each of their systems.

That's not just negotiating antenna time. It's deploying infrastructure to get the raw data from the antenna site to our processing system, ensuring our systems can talk to their networks, and testing the whole chain end-to-end.

That integration work gives us options. For any collection, we can choose the optimal antenna location based on where the satellite will pass, where the customer operates, and what network capacity is available.

The physical antenna location has more impact on latency than almost any other variable—a 500-mile difference in the location of your downlink site can change delivery time by 20+ minutes. The scale of this integrated network is unique to Vantor across the GEOINT industry.

Space-based mesh networks, laser communications, and on-board processing will likely play a role in reducing latency long-term. In the meantime, rethinking production architecture and leveraging distributed infrastructure is delivering order-of-magnitude improvements that make a real difference to defense, intelligence, and humanitarian missions today.