Ever wanted to watch the world — in real-time HD — from space? Well prepare to experience what it’d be life if the world was your very own video game and check out a few planes landing at Beijing airport. It will be the coolest planespotting you’ve ever done.
What you see here is Skybox’s SkySat-1 turning its amazing cyber-eyes towards Beijing Capital International Airport (PEK) airport in Beijing on 30 December 2013. Crazy right? Makes you want to go play Red Alert 2 or something.
Good news: There will be more. Skybox can use its SkySat-1 to offer 90-second videos of this quality for any spot on Earth. Bad news: They charge for it, and probably out the nose! This clip in collaboration with MapBox is just a tantalising taste, and unless you’re super loaded, you’ll just have to hold out for freebies.
While you’re just going to have to sit back and wait for Skybox to drop more gratis footage to get another fix here, there’s another project called UrtheCast attempting roughly the same thing (but free-er) by mounting HD streaming cameras on the ISS. The cameras are already there, just not streaming yet. So consider this a sneak peek into the future, where a bird’s eye view is just a few clicks away. And just try to forget that the NSA has probably had this for like a decade already. [MapBox]