In November 2020, Albuquerque Mayor Tim Keller announced that his city had entered into a “game-changing partnership” with a little-known aerospace startup called Theia Group Inc. Theia, based in Washington, DC, was planning to build a multibillion-dollar, 80-acre facility in Albuquerque to manufacture observation satellites it would then deploy and manage. The startup envisioned total extraterrestrial surveillance—a sprawling constellation of satellites capturing detailed shots of the entire Ea...