The Inspector Stops Counting What the Camera Cannot See

Spacecraft inspection planners often mark a component visible after a geometric line-of-sight check even when eclipse, self-shadowing or reflection leaves the image uninformative. This framework trains a classifier variational autoencoder on rendered component patches and uses latent variance as a continuous image-grounded information measure. In photorealistic simulation across multiple orbits, the planner produced mean brightness of 0.57, with 81.6 percent of observations above 0.25. Geometric baselines achieved 0.02 and 0.04 mean brightness. The evidence is simulated, but it shows why inspection coverage and usable imagery are different objectives.