Digital Globe: Pictures from the sky

The idea is simple enough: put a camera on a satellite and take pictures of the Earth below. As usual, the devil is in the details.

Those details were described in Walter Scott’s recent talk to Boulder Rotary Club. Scott is executive vice president and chief technical officer for Digital Globe, the largest provider of such high resolution imagery.

He is also one of the founders of the company, which operates its own group of imaging satellites. If Digital Globe’s head is above the clouds, its feet are firmly on the ground with a headquarters in Longmont, a thriving business, its stock on the New York Exchange (ticker DGI) and a portfolio of success stories about the value of imaging the Earth from above.

“We’re asked whether we have concern about the spy-like nature of the business,” said Scott. “The fact is that we think worldwide transparency is a good thing. It helps people act on the basis of correct information rather than of fears and myths.”

Obviously, DGI is a relatively new company. Satellites came after railroads in the history of technology.

“The end of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s helped create a demand for information,” Scott said. “Before that there had been a bipolar world. After that there were more players of significance, and therefore a great demand for information on exactly what was going on.”

A statute passed in those years gave private entities federal permission to fly and use satellites, along with regulation for the operations.

“In addition, improved satellite technology lowered the costs and so made private operation financially possible,” he said.

It was possible, but not easy. To date DGI has used about $1 billion, meaning a lot of investors had to be wooed and won. The company lost its first two satellites; its successful third satellite in 2001 came just as the dot.com meltdown gave technology a bad name. But Digital Globe kept on, and now almost 10 years later can point to a stream of successful applications of its technology.

Global positioning satellites enable DGI to pinpoint locations with a resolution of four meters, and control of the satellites makes up to date information available. A case study of the way satellite photos were used to guide emergency response to a California mudslide that took out houses is available at http://www.digitalglobe.com; click on the humanitarian link.

Other local interests are involved in Digital Globe. Some of the optics used in the cameras came from Ball Corp. The cameras, by the way, are the seeing parts of telescopes more than a meter in diameter.

The future? Scott is optimistic. “Yes, bad people can use the technology to do bad things, but the good outweighs the bad,” he said. “Consider, for example, the benefit to the world of knowing about Iranian nuclear capability.”

In any case, the Peeping Tom capability of the handful of imaging satellites pales against what folks can do with the 1.5 billion cell phone cameras already clicking around us every day.

Digital Globe plans to launch a new satellite on October 6. Expect new capabilities from space to be coming soon.




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