View From Above
For DigitalGlobe CEO Jill Smith, things are looking down — and that’s great news as the company expands its earth-imaging business.
Evan Kafka
Even if we are only half right about the opportunities now before us, we are about to boldly go where no commercial earth-imaging company has gone before,” says Jill Smith, president and CEO of DigitalGlobe Inc. (DGI) during the Oct. 8, 2009, launch of WorldView-2, the company’s third and most powerful satellite in its high-resolution, remote-sensing constellation. “This is the tipping point,” she announces while seated in the control room of Vandenberg Air Force Base in California with WorldView-2 just outside, encapsulated in a rocket and nearing liftoff. We are entering a whole new arena.”
Overseeing the countdown from DigitalGlobe’s headquarters in Longmont, Colo., is Walter Scott, the company’s founder and CTO. “The Russians have a saying about rocket launches,” he says calmly. “Toast not to success, for that would be hubris; toast instead to your preparations.” A Harvard- and Berkeley-educated scientist skilled in space, defense, computing and remote-sensing programs, Scott, 51, takes it all in stride. “We’ve been through this before,” he says. “We’ve done our preparations, our training, our reviews, our checking. The main activity is waiting and trusting that the work we’ve done over the past few years will pay off.”
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VIEW THE FIRST IMAGES FROM WORLDVIEW-2
WorldView-2
Collecting around 1 million square kilometers (386,000 square miles) of images daily, DigitalGlobe says its other satellites — QuickBird-2, launched in 2001, and WorldView-1, launched in 2007 — helped elevate the company to the top of the burgeoning field of commercial geospatial imagery. WorldView-2, says Smith, is expected to double DigitalGlobe’s image-collection capabilities to more than 500 million square kilometers of high-resolution imagery every year.
The much anticipated launch of WorldView-2 went smoothly, says Smith. An hour after blasting off, she explains, WorldView-2 separated from the Delta vehicle and commenced initialization of its onboard processors. And just 11 days later, on October 19, DigitalGlobe released the first images from WorldView-2. The company says that WorldView-2 is expected to achieve full operational capability on January 4.
Applications
Beginning with Landsat, the satellite observation program launched in 1972 and still active today, earth imaging was long the exclusive domain of the U.S. and Soviet militaries. Since 1993, when Scott founded DigitalGlobe’s predecessor, WorldView Imaging Corp., commercialization has steadily expanded. From governmental to gaming applications, it’s a market projected to go galactic, say analysts. In a 2009 report from satellite sector consulting and analysis firm Euroconsult SA, the global satellite-imagery market was forecast to surpass $1 billion in 2009 and to grow by 16 percent a year during the next decade.
Historically, the company reports, the U.S. government has been DigitalGlobe’s largest customer. But it also sells its satellite images to international defense and intelligence concerns, domestic and international civil government agencies and various commercial enterprises around the world, Smith says, including Google and Microsoft.
