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but I keep getting asked the question "if this image was taken by a satellite from 14 miles above the moon, why isn't it as clear as say images in google maps where you can see cars easily and the scale is 10metres".
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Take it from someone who has a fair bit of experience with this sort of stuff, at 10 metres resolution, you will not see a car. You'll be flat out seeing most houses. To see a house with any sort of clarity, you need at least 1-2 metre resolution on the detectors. That also goes for cars. 5 metre resolution, which is quite common on many satellites, will only show most cars as a pixel...and that's for a large car. A house will cover 2-3 pixels for most houses. Most commercial and governmental run environmental monitoring platforms, such as Landsat and Spot, have a series of detectors which range in resolution from 1-2 metres for the high res detectors to 5-10 metres for the medium res detectors.
Most of those shots you see in Google Earth were taken from planes flying anywhere between 20000 and 40000 feet. The only orbiting platforms which have the capability to view houses, cars and even people at such high resolutions are the US Keyhole and LaCrosse satellites and the Russian Persona satellites. The Persona's have a resolution of 33cm, which is less than the LaCrosse satellites which can track and identify targets the size of a tennis ball from 700km. So, the chances you'd get of seeing any of these images from such satellites appearing at all in Google are even less than nothing. They're purely top secret military imaging satellites.