Earlier this month, entrepreneur Corey Jaskolski pulled out a pen and drew his best guess at what the surveillance balloon shot down by a US jet would have looked like from space. Then he fed the sketch and “a gob” of recent satellite images from the area where the balloon was taken down into algorithms developed by his image and video detection startup Synthetatic, and waited.
Within two minutes, he says, the algorithms found the 200-foot-tall balloon off the coast of South Carolina. “I couldn’t believe it,” Jaskolski says. Nor could his wife when he excitedly showed her his results. But when he estimated the altitude of
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