What
About the Next Next-Generation Imaging Satellites?
By
Edward A. Jurkevics, Chesapeake Analytics Corp. (www.chesanal.com),
Arlington
,
VA
Earth Imaging Journal (www.eijournal.com)
March/April 2006
During the last few months,
geospatial industry analysts have been watching ORBIMAGE CEO Matt
O’Connell digest his walloping catch, Space Imaging. Between gulps,
O’Connell is keen to teach the new remote sensing math: ORBIMAGE + Space
Imaging = GeoEye.
Company insiders report that the integration is
progressing well, and spirits are high at the newly merged entity. And why
shouldn’t they be? The company sits in a sweet position, with Orbview-3
and IKONOS on orbit and the NextView bird GeoEye-1 on the integration
bench. By the middle of 2007 GeoEye will have three high-resolution
cameras plying the heavens. Add to that a clutch of fat National
Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) contracts in hand, the massive IKONOS
archive and Space Imaging’s international groundstation network, and the
company looks set for the future.
But this is no time for complacency. NGA’s
industry-making contract vehicles ClearView and NextView expire in 2008,
and there are no replacement programs in sight. That puts more than half
of GeoEye’s and industry rival DigitalGlobe’s revenues in jeopardy.
The uncertainty for the industry multiplies because NGA’s director,
retired Air Force Lt. Gen. James R. Clapper, Jr., announced he is
departing the agency this summer. According to the
Baltimore
Sun, he fell out with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld about the issue
of National Intelligence Director John D. Negroponte’s oversight of
NGA’s activities. Rumsfeld’s view of NGA as a combat support agency
convinced him there’s only one proper chain of command for NGA, and that
is to the Pentagon. Ah, a good old
Washington
turf war!
Funding
Concerns
Yes, the dust-up between Negroponte and Rumsfeld
seems to have caught Clapper in a crossfire, and he will be missed by the
remote sensing community. The White House’s U.S. Commercial Remote
Sensing Space Policy of 2003 directed the NGA to “rely to the maximum
practical extent on commercial remote sensing space capabilities for
filling imagery and geospatial needs.” Clapper readily complied,
ultimately establishing ClearView contracts with all three commercial
satellite owner/operators, and issuing NextView contracts totaling $1
billion dollars to GeoEye and DigitalGlobe.
The industry’s worry is that any new NGA director
will take too long to settle in and develop and secure follow-on contracts
to ClearView and NextView. And any NGA commercial imagery funding gap in
2008 and afterwards would cause havoc in the two-company industry, sending
shivers down the spine of Wall Streeters who have invested in this
technology.
The optimal business model for industry and NGA would
be an arrangement with the firms in which NGA makes a multiyear commitment
to acquire data of agreed quantity, quality and price. With this
commitment in hand the companies would be able to finance the construction
and launch of an appropriate ongoing constellation that meets the NGA’s
geospatial data requirements. NGA wouldn’t need to cost share for
construction as it has with NextView, but NGA must provide a multiyear
guarantee. Cocktail-napkin analysis of the owner-operator financial models
shows that NGA’s long-term commitment is required to sustain a healthy
supplier base in the commercial high-resolution remote sensing industry.
FIA
Fiasco
The
U.S.
government’s alternatives to supporting the commercial remote sensing
industry look grim indeed. The ongoing fiasco in the National
Reconnaissance Office’s Future Imagery Architecture (
FIA
) program makes you want to weep. In 1999, Boeing unseated Lockheed Martin
for this lucrative contract to build the next-generation imagery
reconnaissance satellites, a role Lockheed held for several decades. The
ensuing litany of horrors, according to GlobalSecurity.org, has the
government spending $10 billion on
FIA
between 1999 and 2005, of which $4 billion to $5 billion was cost
overruns. The keyboard’s exclamation mark is altogether too frail for
what is needed here. Trite will have to suffice—a few billion here, a
few billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.
In September 2005, the House, the Senate and
antagonists Rumsfeld and Negroponte had enough “FIAsco” and
transferred the electrooptical satellite construction back to—you
guessed it—Lockheed. The pink slips are flying at Boeing, and it’s a
safe bet that the program’s original schedule is useful only for comic
relief.
FIA
’s projected first launch has been slipping almost a year per year and
is now somewhere around 2009, according to GlobalSecurity.org. One has to
wonder just how assured NGA’s imagery sources from NRO systems really
are.
Meanwhile, reports are that GeoEye’s and
DigitalGlobe’s NextView satellites for NGA are on budget and reasonably
close to schedule. There is every expectation that these new birds will,
as contracted, meet a significant portion of NGA’s geospatial data
requirements by 2007. The Commission to Assess U.S. National Security
Space Management and Organization, chaired by Rumsfeld prior to his
Secretary of Defense appointment, opined that commercial imagery providers
will be able to satisfy approximately half of NGA’s requirements for
information on the location of objects on Earth.
Reason dictates that the NGA should increase its
reliance on the commercial remote sensing industry. When it comes to
long-term federal budgeting, the time is now for the
U.S.
government to lay the groundwork for important commercial imagery
follow-on programs. At a
Naval
Academy
speech in 2001, President George Bush said, “The future of the military
will require innovation and entrepreneurial leadership.” The new NGA
leadership must exhibit these qualities when it comes to imagery. But what
will actually occur in the rarefied air inside the Beltway is anyone’s
guess.
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