The future of American spy satellites is uncertain
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עברית (Hebrew)
In the next few weeks an unlikely government agency known more for weather than regulating satellites, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA), may decide the international future of America’s commercial satellite imagery industry, dominated now by DigitalGlobe.
NOAA licenses American commercial remote sensing satellites, which includes DigitalGlobe’s five satellites currently in orbit. One of the key restrictions these licenses impose on what some call the commercial spy satellite company is how much detail — resolution — their satellite pictures can offer to commercial clients. Currently, the resolution limit is half a meter, although the GeoEye and DigitalGlobe birds can supply photos with resolution at least as low as 10 centimeters to government clients such as the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. So if DigitialGlobe has an image at a higher resolution it actually has to make it blurrier before it can sell the image.
But Walter Scott, DigitalGlobe’s founder and now executive VP and chief technical officer, says there is “significant demand” for quarter-meter resolution from the international market. And that’s why the company applied for a change to the resolution they can be licensed for from half a meter to a quarter meter.
And DigitalGlobe is “optimistic” that NOAA will change the resolution. There are a few reasons for the possibility of a change. Airplane cameras can yield resolution of one inch and satellite optics and their related technologies have improved markedly over the decade since the license standards were put in place, NOAA may well conclude that their current restriction hamstrings American businesses in their attempts to penetrate the international market. As many in the defense industry have argued — and quite a few intelligence professionals — it’s much better for the United States to sell sensitive technology to friendly governments because we both ensure market share and we know with great detail the technical capabilities our friends and allies rely on.
Scott points to the recent sale to the Abu Dhabi by France of two electro-optical satellite, where Lockheed Martin lost the 700 million Euro competition, as a sign of the increasing strength of international competition. DigitalGlobe had hoped to sell GeoEye 2, a satellite consigned to years in a warehouse since DigitialGlobe absorbed GeoEye early this year, to Abu Dhabi. It’s unclear whether the resolution restrictions played any role in Abu Dhabi’s decision to go with the French satellite. Also, the French reportedly offered access to services, including image processing software, expert training and other services as part of the deal. But the Falcon Eye deal, as it’s known, is clearly an arrow in Digital Globe’s quiver as it presses its case with the US government.
Part of the reason DigitalGlobe is so eager to boost foreign sales by making its satellites more technically appealing through the resolution change is that overall spending on commercial imagery by their biggest single client — the United States government — is likely to come down over the next few years as the war in Afghanistan winds down. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has called for double digit cuts to the intelligence budget over the next decade and he made clear that a substantial portion of those cuts would come from the pots of money spent on commercial imagery.
