October 26,2008:
The U.S. NGA (National
Geospatial-Intelligence Agency) is quite happy with its $237 million investment
in the half billion dollar, two ton GeoEye 1 photo satellite. While this is a newly
launched commercial bird, one of its biggest customers is the NGA (which buys
over $10 million worth of images a month). The other big customer is Google,
which uses the GeoEye images for Google Maps (the satellite has the Google logo
on it.)
What makes
GeoEye so important is that it takes color pictures at an ideal resolution (41
centimeters, 16.2 inches) for most military, and many civilian, uses. While the
military has classified photo satellites with ten times better resolution (or
so it's said, exact resolution of current KeyHole birds is classified), the 41
centimeters is good for most military applications. This the generals know
because they can't help but notice how popular Google Maps is with the troops
who are actually planning operations. Rather than go through the hassle, and
wait, of getting high rez classified stuff, Google Maps is good enough. Thus
most of the images the Department of Defense is guying from GeoEye will be
unclassified, or of low classification, so the troops, and American allies, can
more easily get it.
Color is a
big deal as well. In the past, the emphasis was on higher resolution, and color
imagery was sacrificed. But users have
made it clear that they put higher emphasis on color (which makes many images
much more useful) than resolution. The military has also found high resolution
images for Google to be a boon for military intelligence. That's because
thousands of military buffs around the world love to scour Google Maps images
of places like China, North Korea and Iran, and find interesting military
things those secretive countries would rather stay secret. The NGA and CIA
won't say one way or the other, but it would appear that this bit of military
"crowd sourcing" (many people cooperating via the web to get
something done) has found things that the experts missed.
The NGA
contributed nearly half the money for building GeoEye 1 in order to get dibs on
use of the satellite in the event of a national emergency. A similar deal is in
the works for GeoEye 2, an even higher resolution satellite that creates color
photos, which will be launched in two years. The U.S. Congress wants deals like
this to become more common, and has
turned down military, CIA and NGA requests for several military owned GeoEye
type satellites. Congress insists that
it's cheaper and more practical for the military and spies to get most of their
satellite photos from commercial birds. The military wants to own all their
photo satellites, but Congress points out that in wartime, the Pentagon can
take control of the GeoEye birds for the duration. Since Congress makes the
rules and controls the money (and the NGA just screwed up and lost $10 billion
designing a new generation of high end spy satellites), GeoEye is the way to
go, for the moment.
Thus the
strategy will be using more unclassified satellites for supplying military
customers, and reserving the super high resolution (and very expensive, as in
several billion bucks each) KeyHole type birds for specialized needs.