Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy - Eamon Javers [93]
Soon, GeoEye’s offices were crawling with engineers, operations specialists, and technical advisers from the vendors who had built OrbView-3 and its key components. Those included Orbital Sciences Corporation and Northrop Grumman. Collectively, they formed a “tiger team,” of elite satellite mechanics to perform what they called “anomaly resolution.” They’d work over every inch of the system, from the headquarters building up to the satellite, to find the problem.
The first steps were to notify the government, the client expecting to take delivery of that day’s fresh images; and then to notify the company’s licensing authority, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in suburban Silver Spring, Maryland, which granted GeoEye—a private-sector company—the right to operate a satellite in the first place. Calls also went out to the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, and to GeoEye’s customers around the world.
By the end of the day, GeoEye had a diagnosis. The problem was with the camera. And the camera was on the satellite, zipping around the edge of the Earth’s atmosphere. It had been designed with “single string” components, so there were no backup systems on board. There was no way to fix it.
This was a serious blow to GeoEye, whose stock was traded on the NASDAQ exchange. Wall Street securities regulations meant the company was duty-bound to disclose the event to the investing public, as it did in an 8-K filing with the SEC on Thursday, March 8. The document said the company could control the satellite, but couldn’t get pictures from it. GeoEye couldn’t tell the markets whether the satellite could be fixed, or when its fate might be known. In the meantime, GeoEye would try to service its customers with an older satellite, IKONOS.
Investors were startled by the news, and GeoEye’s stock fell sharply, dropping from $18.28 on Thursday to $16.25 by the time the markets closed at 4 P.M. Friday. It had been a lousy week for Bobby Ferraro, but such is life in the high-stakes satellite game.
Ferraro and his team spent much of the next month trying to think up a way to fix the camera. They worked on the problem over and over again until late April. Then they finally gave up.*
WHEN THE SATELLITE OrbView-3 went down, U.S. intelligence agencies weren’t the only ones inconvenienced. GeoEye, which has more than 400 employees worldwide and generated more than $180 million in revenue in 2007, estimates that almost half of its business comes from the private sector. Companies use GeoEye’s three satellites for all kinds of monitoring.
Oil companies can check on the status of their rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. Agricultural giants can generate false-color images of fields, in which red areas show healthy growth and yellowish areas show crops that need help. Developers can generate topographical maps of real estate they might want to buy. Google buys images for use in its popular satellite application GoogleEarth.
GeoEye also sells satellite images of the ocean to fishermen. The pictures identify heavy underwater concentrations of phytoplankton, where the fish will go to feed. Every day, GeoEye’s technicians e-mail satellite maps of these places to ship captains on bridges of trawlers around the world. It’s hardly sporting, but satellite images can save a ship’s captain as much as 10 or 15 percent in fuel costs. Instead of wandering around the ocean hoping to bump into a rich school of fish, the captain steers directly for the best spots.
The commercial satellite industry is still small. GeoEye has only one American competitor: DigitalGlobe, which is based in the Colorado Rockies. DigitalGlobe flies a QuickBird spacecraft that was launched into orbit 450 kilometers above the surface of the Earth in 2001 and captures 75 million square kilometers of imagery data each year.
Overseas, there are several more image providers, including the French company Spot Image, which boasts that its FORMOSAT-2 is the only high-resolution satellite that can take pictures of the same location