Knight Ridder Newspapers March 30, 2001
First commercial satellite photo of Cuba is released
By Warren P. Strobel
WASHINGTON -- A private satellite firm has released the first commercially available picture of Cuba as seen from outer space, depicting in crisp detail ships in Havana harbor, railroad tracks and even the lettering on the roof of a huge warehouse.
The image, snapped in January by a spacecraft orbiting 423 miles overhead, is the latest example of how "spy" satellites, once the exclusive domain of defense and intelligence agencies, have gone private. And the impact of that shift is just beginning to be felt, say experts on the technology.
In the case of Cuba, the effect could be both political and economic. Some Cuban exiles in the Miami area say satellite photographs could be used to inspect and map properties they still claim on the island.
"Many of these people have not seen their properties for 40 years," said Nick Gutierrez, a Miami-area lawyer with about 100 clients who have claims. "We are not going to get these properties back until Fidel Castro is gone. But there are certain steps we can take to prepare for that day."
Under the Helms-Burton law, U.S. citizens can sue foreign companies that are using property expropriated by the Castro government. When he was president, Bill Clinton waived that provision of the law, known as Title 3, each time it came up for renewal. President Bush has not decided what to do when he faces the issue this summer. "It's under review," said a White House official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
An American hotel chain also has expressed interest in satellite photos of Cuba's beaches to prepare for when the U.S. economic embargo against the island is lifted, said Mark Brender, director of Washington operations for Denver-based Space Imaging, which owns and operates the satellite.
The 1,600-pound satellite, called Ikonos, was launched in 1999, joining a handful of other commercial "remote sensing" spacecraft in orbit. Over the next five years, the number of such satellites "is expected to explode," a report by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a Washington think tank, concluded last year.
Because other countries also operate imaging satellites, government "attempts to control access to high-resolution satellite imagery are bound to fail," the Carnegie report concluded.
Ikonos' camera is capable, under optimal conditions, of photographing objects on Earth that are slightly less than 1 meter (about 39 inches) square. That's far less detail than photographs from the Pentagon's classified spy satellites, but still good enough for many purposes. In fact, the Pentagon's National Imagery and Mapping Agency is Space Imaging's biggest customer.
After a lengthy security review, the U.S. government late last year approved Space Imaging's license to launch an even more powerful orbiting camera with half-meter resolution, meaning it can photograph objects on the ground larger than half a meter, or slightly less than 20 inches.
Ikonos has provided images of many hidden military installations previously seen only by government intelligence analysts. They range from North Korea's missile launch pad to Israel's Dimona nuclear reactor to the U.S. Air Force's secret Area 51 testing facility in Nevada.
"In a way, we're entering an age of transparency," said Brender, a former naval officer and ABC-TV news producer. Yet while those high-profile images make headlines, he said, other markets will determine if the new commercial industry thrives. They include mapping, coastal zone management, insurance and risk assessment, urban planning and agriculture.
The image of Havana doesn't appear to show any military secrets. But it clearly depicts sections of Old Havana, the Capitol building and docks jutting into the harbor. The photo's details are best seen by using a computer to zoom in on individual sections.
John Pike, the director of GlobalSecurity.org, a Washington-area defense policy group, said it is one of the first "overhead" (aerial or satellite) images of Cuba made public since the Cuban missile crisis.
On Oct. 25, 1962, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Adlai Stevenson, refuting Soviet denials that it had missiles in Cuba, stunned the world by unveiling U-2 spy plane photographs of the missile emplacements.
Pike said he believes the only photograph released since is an overhead image of the Russian electronic-eavesdropping post at Lourdes, Cuba, published in a Pentagon report in the mid-1980s. Pike said he recently scoured Space Imaging's archives for an updated photograph of the Lourdes installation, but could not find an unobscured image. "I looked at an awful lot of clouds," he said.
Space Imaging and its competitors have yet to prove themselves profitable. Predictions several years ago that there would be a rapidly expanding market for commercial space images have "certainly not turned out to be the case," said John Baker, a technology policy analyst at the nonprofit research institution RAND.
Aerial photography still prevails, said Baker, co-editor of a forthcoming book on commercial imaging satellites. "The satellite firms get all the PR, all the media attention, but it's really the aerial firms that dominate the market," he said.
Still, commercial satellite imagery has several benefits for South Florida. Ikonos can see 90 feet under clear water, Brender said, helping environmentalists inspect the health of coral reefs.
Florida's Division of Forestry is using less-detailed images from the U.S. government's Landsat satellite to build a statewide database of vegetation and other matter that could fuel wildfires.
The project will help authorities predict how fast a wildfire will grow and the chances it will threaten urban areas, said Jim Brenner, a fire management administrator. Satellite pictures are an essential part of the project, he said. Without them, he said, "we would have to map all the fuels across the state on the ground."
2001, Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.
