Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy - Eamon Javers [98]
Imagery from the company’s extensive archive costs $7 per square kilometer, with a minimum order of fifty square kilometers. That makes the minimum purchase price $350. At the top end, accurate 3-D map images can cost as much as $30 per square kilometer. A few thousand dollars will generate the highest-quality images of any relatively large location in the world. A company can also pay extra fees to keep the images it seeks out of GeoEye’s archive for several months, or indefinitely.
With a GeoEye satellite, companies can see objects the size of home plate on a baseball diamond, and with GPS technology, they can plot that object’s location anywhere on the planet to within nine feet. It’s a spy’s dream.
SPY SATELLITE TECHNOLOGY wasn’t available at all to private individuals until 1972, when NASA launched the first civilian remote sensing satellite, Landsat-1. The images that this satellite delivered back were eighty-meter resolution, too rough for much commercial use. The technology remained largely in the hands of scientists and teachers.6 Early on, the U.S. government established a key principle called “nondiscriminatory access.” Landsat images would be available to anyone who requested them, for a price.7
In 1979, President Carter transferred authority over the Landsat program from NASA to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and pushed NOAA to help expand the civilian satellite market. But the corporate world was slow to realize the potential of the available satellite images, and Congress had to act again in 1984 to push satellite images into the private sector. The legislators did this by turning the entire Landsat program over to a private contractor, Earth Observation Satellite Company (EOSAT), a joint venture of RCA Corporation and Hughes Aircraft Company.
But the government didn’t come through with expected federal subsidies, and the venture faltered. Without much federal cash flowing into the program, prices soared to a point where one image could cost $4,000 or more. Academics and many scientists were priced out of the market, and the number of orders dwindled. EOSAT limped along for the next several years as a cobbled-together public-private partnership. It had to go hat in hand to Congress for funds.
By the early 1990s Congress and the Pentagon had begun to panic. The French had launched two satellites of their own, which were selling more pictures than the Landsat program was. And in 1991 the Gulf War in Kuwait showed the Pentagon how helpful satellite imagery could be during a land war—planners began to realize that a thriving commercial satellite system could be a national security asset if another war broke out.
Congress weighed in with the Land Remote Sensing Policy Act of 1992, which shuttled the troubled Landsat program back into the purview of NASA and the Department of Defense, and streamlined the licensing process for potential corporate satellite operators. That move, and the end of the cold war, helped lift the culture of secrecy from the satellite community. Companies began to issue optimistic predictions of the size of the future commercial market.
In early 1993, WorldView, Inc., became the first company licensed to operate a commercial land view satellite. WorldView’s corporate descendant is DigitalGlobe, which is still going strong today. Since then, NOAA has issued seventeen licenses.8 As the 1990s went on, advances in computing technology and the availability of broadband Internet access meant that a much wider audience had the means to access and process satellite images instantly. And in 2006, Google introduced its GoogleEarth application, bringing instant satellite images into the home of anyone in the world with an Internet connection.
But even as the government pushed for two decades to get satellite technology into the private sector, it placed restrictions on how far that technology could go. Today, companies like DigitalGlobe and GeoEye operate under several federal constraints.9 First, image resolution is