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Spy satellite built in Colo. set to lift off

Device will deliver sharper images

Roger Fillion, Rocky Mountain News

Published September 14, 2007 at midnight

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A Colorado-built satellite is poised to usher in a new breed of commercial spy satellites that can snap sharper photos of objects hundreds of miles below on Earth.

DigitalGlobe Inc.'s WorldView-1 satellite is sitting atop a Boeing Delta II rocket at California's Vandenberg Air Force Base. Launch is scheduled for Tuesday.

The satellite is the size of a large SUV and is the first of three next-generation commercial U.S. satellites scheduled for liftoff during the next couple of years.

The satellites are designed to deliver the clearest photos yet to consumers, businesses and Uncle Sam.

"This new generation in its entirety really is going to sharpen the images people see in Google, Microsoft, Yahoo! and MapQuest with about four times the detail," said analyst Edward Jurkevics of Chesapeake Analytics in Arlington, Va.

The WorldView-1 - built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. in Boulder - is engineered to snap objects about 18 inches across.

"You can clearly see windshields on cars," said Chuck Herring, spokesman for Longmont-based DigitalGlobe.

The company's existing QuickBird satellite, launched in 2001, photographs objects about 2 feet across.

"You can clearly see a car," Herring said.

Herring said DigitalGlobe, which also is building a second WorldView satellite, will be able to collect about five times more imagery with its new spacecraft.

Ball Aerospace is slated to finish construction of WorldView-2 by late 2008. No launch date has been set. Unlike WorldView-1, which will provide black-and- white photos, World View-2 will provide color.

A Pentagon spy agency, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, will control where most of the WorldView-1 photos are shot, although the photos will be available to the public. WorldView-2 is targeting consumer, business and government customers.

Dulles, Va.-based GeoEye Inc., which bought Thornton-based Space Imaging in 2006, is slated to launch its next-generation GeoEye-1 satellite near the end of the first quarter of 2008 or early in the second quarter.

It will be capable of photographing objects 16 inches across.

Fossett search

With the help of photos provided by commercial spy satellites, Internet users have been aiding in the hunt for missing aviator Steve Fossett.

But that help hasn't been of much use in finding Fossett, missing since Sept. 3 after taking off on a solo flight southeast of Reno, Nev.

The satellite photos, supplied by Longmont-based DigitalGlobe and Virginia-based GeoEye, have been delivered to Google and Amazon.com to help in the search. The imagery apparently is not sharp enough for Web users to pinpoint the debris of a small plane.

"A lot of people think they've seen a lot of things," said Maj. Cynthia Ryan, spokeswoman for the Nevada Wing of the Civil Air Patrol. "They're not getting the resolution they need to identify something on the ground of this nature."

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