Defense Week May 19, 2003
Feds Want More Reliance On Commercial Satellites
By Ann Rooselvelt
The U.S. government will rely more on commercial remote-sensing imagery and will bolster the satellite industry under a new White House policy released last week.
The new policy is meant "to advance and protect U.S. national security and foreign policy interests by maintaining the nation's leadership in remote-sensing space activities and by sustaining and enhancing the U.S. remote sensing industry."
The policy "comes as a relief rather than a surprise, in the sense that it has been long awaited and I think is widely appreciated" by the industry, said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a security web site.
"The important thing that, is different [from 1994] is that within the last year or so, this administration is committed to actually spending serious money buying this imagery," Pike said. "A commitment to do that may have been implicit in the 1994 space policy directive, but it had not been implemented until quite recently."
The 1994 policy "enabled" the fledgling industry to get off the ground, while the new policy offers additional government support, said Mark Brender, vice president of corporate communications at Space Imaging, which launched the world's first commercial high-resolution imaging satellite, Ikonos, in 1999.
To support the industry, the new policy states that the government will "rely to the maximum practical extent on U.S. commercial remote-sensing space capabilities for filling imagery and geospatial needs for military, intelligence, foreign policy, homeland security and civil users."
The government has become a primary customer of commercial high-resolution space imagery over the past few years. Space Imaging, for example, provided high-resolution imagery to the Defense Department during the war in Afghanistan-images now mostly available for commercial sale, Brender said. The company also provided space imagery during the Iraq War.
Meanwhile, the policy says, government's own sensing satellites will focus on requirements that commercial suppliers can't meet for national-security reasons. The policy also expects to provide "a timely and responsive regulatory environment for licensing the operations and exports of commercial remote-sensing space systems."
The export issue has long been a thorn in the industry's side, because of how long it takes to get a license and limits on the export of certain technologies. The new policy shows the government is backing a "favorable export environment," Brender said.
Denver, Colo.-based Space Imaging-with its key investors, Lockheed Martin Corp. and Raytheon Co. as principal sub-contractors-said it will bid on the NextView satellites, the National Imagery and Mapping Agency's competitive contract to assure high-resolution imagery is available from next-generation U.S. commercial imaging satellites.
Copyright © 2003, King Communications Group
