Tracking construction progress from orbit, honestly

A lender with forty active sites cannot walk them all, and monthly photo reports show whatever the contractor pointed the camera at. Satellite change detection offers the neutral version: the same sensor, the same angle, every site, every week. Earthwork phases are unmistakable from orbit — clearing, grading, and foundation work each leave signatures a model can flag reliably.

The limits deserve equal billing. Optical imagery cannot see through cloud, cannot measure vertical progress inside a structure, and resolves nothing about work quality. Treat orbital change detection as a screening layer that answers one question well: which sites changed, and which sites that should have changed did not.

The teams getting value pair the two scales deliberately. Satellites watch the whole portfolio and rank the anomalies; drones and field visits go where the ranking points. Nobody flies forty sites a week, and after the first quarter of doing this, nobody wants to.