Because everything on the surface of the Earth is visible from space, and some people have put things on the surface of the Earth that they would prefer certain other people not know about.
If the license is required to sense remotely, the issuing agency can do some research, then tell the licensee "you cannot broadcast, transmit, or record for later transmission images taken from T+5:53:11 to T+5:56:43". And then they check the flight path, and that's when the vehicle will be directly over one of the Aleutian islands. The engineers shrug their shoulders, and program a 4-minute blackout into the cameras.
And the crew in Alaska can then go around throwing camouflage netting over everything, and inflate the decoys, and not do any work outside, during any times that an object known or suspected to have imaging devices on it passes overhead.
It's a temporary measure, as the superpowers continue to move their most important secret facilities to camouflaged, submarine, or underground facilities. But it won't be long before someone's cubesat with commercial-grade camera unwittingly images something it shouldn't, and the Men in Black visit the owner with a DoD order to classify all their electronic equipment as "Top Secret", with a "no-foreign" endorsement. It would all be confiscated, examined, scrubbed, declassified, and returned after a few months.
The license is likely so that the keepers of the secrets can know the imaging capabilities of some of the objects they track in orbit, and maybe get some cooperation from the owners.
If the license is required to sense remotely, the issuing agency can do some research, then tell the licensee "you cannot broadcast, transmit, or record for later transmission images taken from T+5:53:11 to T+5:56:43". And then they check the flight path, and that's when the vehicle will be directly over one of the Aleutian islands. The engineers shrug their shoulders, and program a 4-minute blackout into the cameras.
And the crew in Alaska can then go around throwing camouflage netting over everything, and inflate the decoys, and not do any work outside, during any times that an object known or suspected to have imaging devices on it passes overhead.
It's a temporary measure, as the superpowers continue to move their most important secret facilities to camouflaged, submarine, or underground facilities. But it won't be long before someone's cubesat with commercial-grade camera unwittingly images something it shouldn't, and the Men in Black visit the owner with a DoD order to classify all their electronic equipment as "Top Secret", with a "no-foreign" endorsement. It would all be confiscated, examined, scrubbed, declassified, and returned after a few months.
The license is likely so that the keepers of the secrets can know the imaging capabilities of some of the objects they track in orbit, and maybe get some cooperation from the owners.