Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy - Eamon Javers [95]
The flagship spacecraft, GeoEye-1, is two stories tall; in orbit, this whole satellite can tilt, pivoting about fifty degrees in any direction to shoot specific targets as it whizzes by. It makes twelve or thirteen orbits each day. It maintains what’s known as a “sun-synchronous” orbit: that is, it can pass over a given area at 10:30 A.M. local time every day. In a single pass, it can capture two images of the same target from different points in space, and so it has the ability to create three-dimensional pictures.* It will be able to capture images of up to 700,000 square kilometers per day, and more than 225 million square kilometers per year. It is expected to last for ten years, but as GeoEye found out with OrbView-3, this doesn’t necessarily mean it will.
To download pictures from satellites in orbit, GeoEye maintains ground stations with satellite receivers in places as remote as Barrow, Alaska, and Tromso, Norway. It maintains an unmanned station at the Troll research station on the antarctic ice sheet. In this regard, GeoEye is better positioned than the U.S. government. As the result of international treaties, the military and intelligence agencies aren’t allowed to build their own ground stations at the bottom of the world. But GeoEye can.
Despite its advanced capabilities, GeoEye doesn’t know how its customers are using the images they buy. Brender says clients simply give GeoEye the location they’re after, and the satellite snaps the picture. The provider doesn’t know why the client wants the picture, or who the client is snooping on. All the company gets is the location. And that’s all it needs: whether the client is spying on a competitor or looking at its own assets is irrelevant to GeoEye—the company gets paid either way. To GeoEye, every location is the same. “It’s all Earth,” says Brender with a shrug.
He points to a satellite image of a strip mine in West Virginia. The mining company has chopped off the entire top of a mountain, clearing hundreds of feet of earth to get at the precious coal beneath. A picture of the mine’s progress would be somewhat helpful for the mining company, but the executives there already know how the dig is going—they walk the site every day.
The image would be truly helpful, Brender says, to the mining company’s competitor. Mining bosses at a rival company don’t have access to the site. “If you were the competitor to that mining company, you might be able to watch that mine to see how much progress they’re making,” says Brender. The competitor could figure out how much coal had been found, how much it would cost to recover the environmental damage done by the massive excavators, and how much profit would be generated. With a sufficiently knowledgeable observer, you might be able to get a pretty good sense of whether or not the mining company would hit Wall Street’s estimates of its quarterly earnings.
ONE CLIENT OF GeoEye is Lanworth, a thirty-person firm in Itasca, Illinois, about forty minutes east of Chicago.* This company uses images from GeoEye and other satellite providers to beat the U.S. Department of Agriculture at its own game. To understand how, you need to know a bit about how the commodities market is closely linked with the government.
Each week, the Department of Agriculture (USDA) releases several reports on the prospects for different types of farm products, such as soybeans, chicken, eggs, and farm-raised catfish. The reports detail prices, harvesting progress, inventory, and other information that goes into calculating the prices of commodities futures on Wall Street. (Commodities futures are simply contracts to buy or sell a given product.)
In a hilarious movie from 1983 starring Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd, Trading Places, the climactic scene involved Murphy’s and Aykroyd’s characters intercepting a crop report on orange juice in an attempt to corner the futures market on