8th Continent Chamber Focus: DigitalGlobe

"False color" photo shows damage from the Olde Stage Road fire Jan. 8 in Boulder, Colo. The red areas indicate forested areas that escaped the fire. Image provided by DigitalGlobe.

DigitalGlobe, a founding sponsor of the 8th Continent Project, plans to launch its third commercial remote sensing satellite, WorldView-2, in the third quarter of 2009.

Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corp., which is building the WorldView-2 spacecraft, integrated its remote sensing instrument and has begun system-level testing of the satellite’s design integrity. ITT Corp.’s Space Systems Division provided the instrument, which will collect eight bands of multi-spectral imagery at 1.8-meter resolution and 46-centimeter resolution panchromatic imagery.

The Space 2.0 connection: We can see the potential growth path of today’s Space 2.0 start-ups in the success of DigitalGlobe. The Longmont company opened its doors in 1992 and that year received the first-ever high-resolution commercial remote sensing license issued by the U.S. government. Its “frontier satellite,” QuickBird, launched in October 2001 and offered images to the commercial market for the first time in May 2002.

WorldView-1, also a product of Ball Aerospace and ITT Space Systems, launched in Sept. 2007.

Ball and ITT are solid Space 1.0 companies. Ball Corp., Aerospace’s parent company, has 14,500 employees and $7.5 billion in worldwide sales; since 1956, its aerospace unit has executed billions of dollars in projects for “important national agencies such as the Department of Defense, NASA, NOAA and other U.S. government and commercial entities.”

DigitalGlobe bridged the divide between military satellite imaging and the commercial market, opening the doors of aerospace for a legion of small companies whose businesses are based on the data that comes from space. These small firms have access to a library of high-resolution world imagery that, with the launch of WorldView-2, will expand to nearly 2 million square kilometers of image collection per day and multiple daily revisits to one location.

One of DigitalGlobe’s customers, Google Earth, makes earth images available to anyone with a home computer, extending now to mobile phones. To achieve this, Google acquired longtime DigitalGlobe customer Keyhole Corp. in 2004. In the last two years, DigitalGlobe says, its ratio of government to commercial customers moved from 80/20 to 60/40, with new imaging and navigation applications being dreamed up all the time.

To connect with the growing Space 2.0 community, join the 8th Continent Chamber of Commerce or find out more about what we’re accomplishing at www.8cproject.com.