I've just (finally!) finished The Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy from Liu Cixin. Great piece of science-fiction, recently done as TV series by Netflix. Anyway, in the third tome of the trilogy we have a description of the visible spectrum space telescope with lenses of up to 2000 m diameter, allowing to observe the shape of the star that is 47 light years from Earth.
It would be great to have it, but it's still more fiction, than science :) We have to deal with what we have, and soon Maxar Technologies will finally launch new batch of their WorldView satellites called Legion. 6 of them should be launched this year with 30 cm GSD capabilities. And they will be used to monitor the space... from space. It's a part of the industry that will have lots of interest in the next years.
Anyway, Maxar's new satellites are state-of-the-art now. Going to submeter resolution poses a new challenges not only on optics (it needs to be huge!), but also on sensors, their performance and most notably - the performance of the AOCS of the satellite platform. I guess that's why in the end companies like Maxar or Airbus are doing their own satellites.
And where we are in Europe in comparison to the Maxar? Well, we have Pleiades Neo from Airbus Defence and Space, but if we look at NewSpace segment working in the submeter region, it's not so much. We have only some companies, that's why we're working hard with Robert Hook and his team of Marble Imaging to build new European capabilities of having our own source of Very High Resolution data. It will take some time, but we'll get there!
Credits for image: Maxar