Boston Globe August 5, 2002
High-tech industry makes mark in US war
Companies now doing military surveillance
By Chryss Cada, Globe Correspondent, 8/5/2002
Anchored by the high-tech manufacturing industry and expertise along the Front Range of the Rockies, two Colorado-based commercial satellite companies, Space Imaging and DigitalGlobe, are acting as mission control for much of the ''shadow war'' in Afghanistan, doing military surveillance work from innocuous business parks on the edges of corn fields and prairie dog villages.
While the government has been using satellite technology for more than 40 years, it has begun to delegate certain tasks to the growing commercial satellite industry to save government satellites for more precise and classified work. The commercial industry can provide a ''big picture'' context in which to place the more-detailed images from government satellites.
Although the exact resolution of government satellites is classified, experts estimate it to be up to 10 centimeters, allowing them to detect objects as small as 4 to 6 inches in diameter. Commercial satellites provide 1 meter to 60 centimeters resolution, allowing them to pick up objects about a yard wide. Put another way, commercial satellites could tell you the color, make, and model of a car, while government satellites could pick out the license plate.
But higher resolution is not always better, explains Steven Aftergood, an intelligence policy analyst with the Federation of American Scientists.
''Sometimes the sharpest image is more than you need,'' he said. ''One meter or half-meter resolutions are more than adequate for many national security needs.''
Commercial-level resolution is enough to monitor the massing of troops or artillery and to identify the state of preparedness of military facilities.
''Not all jobs require high resolution imagery,'' said Joan Mears, spokeswoman for the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, which handles satellite photography for the government. ''The area coverage - or footprint - by the commercial sensors is generally a very liberal area and useful for getting a macroscopic view of an area of interest.''
When Operation Enduring Freedom was announced at the end of September, the US military had only outdated Russian maps of Afghanistan. On Oct. 7, the imagery and mapping agency contracted with Space Imaging for exclusive rights of certain areas, including Afghanistan's.
Space Imaging's Ikonos 1 satellite was launched in 1999. From its position 423 miles above the earth, it travels 7,000 miles per hour (or 4 miles a second). It passes over every section of the earth every three days. It has color capabilities and 1-meter resolution, allowing it to see areas as small as 3-feet square.
The images from Ikonos 1 can be transformed into three-dimensional representations of buildings and terrain, which pilots can use to plot routes, intelligence to plan covert operations, and generals to place ground troops.
The government's exclusive contract with Space Imaging expired Dec. 4. The imagery and mapping agency has contracts with the three US commercial satellite imagery companies: Space Imaging, DigitalGlobe, and Virginia-based OrbImage, which will launch its satellite imagery this fall.
''After 9/11, the government saw the value of our product,'' said Mark Brender, Space Imaging's executive director of government affairs. ''There had never been a conflict while this technology was available, so now they had new applications.''
Commercial satellite imagery's usefulness has extended beyond the early stages of the war in Afghanistan.
In early June, George Tenet, director of central intelligence, sought expanded use of commercial satellites for mapping. Government satellites should be used only for mapping in ''exceptional circumstances,'' he wrote in a memo to the National Imagery and Mapping Agency.
''It's just an efficient division of labor,'' said John Pike, president of globalsecurity.org, a public nonprofit organization that does defense and space policy analysis. ''The more time commercial satellites spend doing mapping, the more time they [government satellites] can spend looking for Osama [bin Laden].''
Commercial satellites also increase surveillance coverage.
''The government's satellites aren't everywhere all the time,'' said Brender. ''While they don't produce as detailed of images, commercial satellites provide another set of eyes in the sky.''
Mears, spokeswoman for the imagery and mapping agency, agreed.
''Commercial imagery can be used for low- and medium-priority jobs, freeing the national technical means for the high priority ones,'' Mears said. ''However, it does not have the accuracies required to support some of the more stringent, high priority activities such as targeting.''
Commercial imagery has another distinct advantage.
''We typically look to commercial imagery for ability to share,'' Mears said. ''Because commercial imagery is unclassified, we can generate unclassified products to share with coalition partners.'' Their partners range from other governments to humanitarian relief organizations.
Aftergood, the intelligence policy analyst, said that the satellite's path into the private sector is unique.
''For decades it [high-resolution satellite technology] was the sole prerogative of two superpowers,'' he said. ''While the path from government innovation to the public sector is a well-worn one, satellite has come a longer way.
''Now anybody with $1,000 or so can access what was once the exclusive domain of these higher superpowers.''
Space Imaging charges $18 per square kilometer for its images, $7 per square kilometer for archived imagery over the United States. Since 60 percent of the earth is covered with clouds on any given day, orders may take up to two months to be delivered.
Space Imaging has dishes in Colorado, Alaska, and Finland. DigitalGlobe has two dishes, in Alaska and Norway. But both companies have mission controls at their headquarters north of Denver.
Mission control is manned 24 hours a day, so that staff members can download images from their satellites and program them for images to be taken during their next orbit.
Colorado is not only a hotbed of satellite manufacturing, but also of technical know-how. The state is home to the US Space Command, Air Force Space Command, and North American Aerospace Defense Command.
This story ran on page A3 of the Boston Globe on 8/5/2002.
Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company.
