Wednesday, September 24. 2008

Reacting to BASIC Contract

Seeking Alpha and The Space Review respond to the recent BASIC announcement.

Says Seeking Alpha, "I think that it’s obvious from where I stand that the government doesn’t need to launch two of their own satellites to compete with what is already available. ...

As far as we are concerned as stockholders, even if this program is approved next year and satellites are launched by early 2013, it does not affect our current investment thesis with shares of GeoEye, especially now that GeoEye-1 has successfully launched, and is almost ready to start taking usable imagery."

The Space Review says we hoped for more from commercial imagery companies. "There was never any real possibility that, by the end of this decade, dozens of privately-owned spy satellites would be orbiting the Earth selling their pictures commercially while exposing human rights violations and helping to send polluters and other environmental criminals to jail.

Instead, we have a modest number of highly sophisticated spacecraft and a slightly larger number of relatively simple ones, mostly devoted to governmental purposes, above all military."

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Remote Sensing, Geospatial Business at 06:00 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0) |

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I think it's obvious that the Government DOES need to launch two of their own satellites.

At ~ 15km swath width, and useful revisits every few days, and factoring in cloud cover, it takes many months to cover an area of interest with one of these satellites.

To be responsive and effective in serving their mission, the Government probably should launch another 4 or 5 more.

It's cheaper to the Gov't to pay the commercial market a share of the cost and take a primary customer role - but Gov't hates lack of control, and owning their own gives them the oppt'y to do it their way. It's also easier contractually and WRT licensing - BASIC frees the gov't from the redistribution issues that arise when buying commercial products.

#1 Archie Belaney on 2008-09-25 14:54 (Reply)

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