[Satellite News – 1-15-08] With the announcement that the WorldView-1 imaging satellite has reached full operating capability, DigitalGlobe’s capacity has been increased five fold, and the company’s biggest problem with its previous satellite has been solved, said Chuck Herring, a DigitalGlobe spokesman.
    “One of our biggest issues was scarcity of capacity,” Herring said. “With WorldView-1 up there, we’re able to address collection on a much broader scale because it collects so much more imagery.”
    A majority of the capacity for WorldView-1, which provides imagery of Earth with a ground resolution of a half-meter, is focused on the U.S. government, Herring said. The U.S. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s  (NGA) NextView program is designed to ensure that the agency has access to commercial imagery. “WorldView-1 was built specifically to address the NextView contract, which is really an order of magnitude larger than the previous contract, ClearView. The U.S. government didn’t buy a satellite, but they essentially bought the priority and capacity to collect off the satellite as well as to buy out of a library.”
    While the government did not buy the latest generation of commercial imagery satellites, its support in keeping the industry viable cannot be overstated.
    “I don’t think the economics of the industry worked without the NGA being there as an anchor tenant,” said Edward Jurkevics, principle analyst at Chesapeake Analytics. “I think the missing piece for years was that NGA did not have reliable long-term contracts like NextView in place. With NGA now assuming the role and being a reliable long-term partner and customer, the prospects for these companies are very good.”
    Now DigitalGlobe and rival GeoEye can focus on developing the commercial side of the business, which has been growing the past several years due to deals with some of the globe’s biggest Internet names.
    In 2002, DigitalGlobe and Google began working together to provide imagery and context for Google Earth, which allows anyone to view images from DigitalGlobe’s library. In 2005, Microsoft signed a deal with Orbimage, which merged with Space Imaging to form GeoEye, and in 2006 GeoEye began providing images to Web portal Yahoo. GeoEye-1, which will have a ground resolution of 0.41 meters, or about 16 inches, is scheduled to be placed into orbit in the late first quarter or early second quarter of 2008.  
    “One of the most impressive uses of commercial satellite imagers has been the use of imagery in the online mapping search engines,” said Mark Brender, a GeoEye spokesman. “That has created a sonic boom of awareness of geospatial technology across all societies.”
    The next big commercial push for the imagery industry will come from the handheld market, said Brender. “I think the next level of use will be handheld devices where you’ll have maps and satellite image maps on handheld devices like cell phones,” he said. “That’s why Nokia spend $8 billion to buy Navteq, and why Tele Atlas was bought by TomTom. We’re moving into a world with the merging of satellite imagery and traditional maps over handheld devices.”
    Another market that might be heating up is people using satellite images to monitor the environment. “There are a lot of people looking at the environmental changes,” Herring said. Glacial changes, coastline monitoring and ocean vegetation can all be monitored by checking satellite images.
    Jurkevics thinks the commercial market, or at least some sectors, are poised for growth throughout the next few years. “It could be that it grows from approximately 20 percent of their market now to 35 or 40 percent in five years,” he said. “In two markets, the internet mapping portals and the real property market, I think that they’ll experience robust growth. It’s very plausible that they’ll have 15 percent growth or better.”