Toward New Partnerships In Remote Sensing: Government, the Private Sector, and Earth Science Research (2002)

This is an opportune time for a discussion of the scientific use of new remote sensing data resources and the emergence of new types of partnerships among data producers and scientists seeking to obtain access to these data. A large number of civil U.S. and international remote sensing satellites are in orbit, including systems owned and operated by the governments of the United States, Europe,¹ Japan, France, India, and China/Brazil;² systems jointly owned or operated by government and commercial entities, such as Canada’s Radarsat and France’s System pour l’Observation de la Terre (SPOT); and two commercially owned and operated systems, Space Imaging, Inc.’s IKONOS and DigitalGlobe Inc.’s QuickBird (see Appendix A). In addition, over the next 5 years more than a dozen new spacecraft are planned for launch and operation by both U.S. and non-U.S. operators, including some systems that will be wholly commercial.³ These systems represent an expanding range of capability in spectral, spatial, and temporal resolution and a growing role for the private sector in system ownership and operation. The current and anticipated diversity in

operational remote sensing systems opens up new types and sources of data for scientific research.

The legal foundation in the United States for a commercial presence in satellite remote sensing was laid out in presidential directives and in the Land Remote Sensing Commercialization Act of 1984. (See Table 1.1, “U.S. Satellite Remote Sensing Commercialization and Policy Time Line.”) This legislation, which was consonant with presidential directives from two previous administrations, established a process for commercializing land remote sensing satellites. The policy outlined, among other things, the terms and conditions for competing and for awarding a contract with a private entity to market unenhanced Landsat data for a period of 6 years.⁴ More recent legislation, including the Land Remote Sensing Policy Act of 1992 and the Commercial Space Act of 1998, was intended to improve the legal and competitive environment for remote sensing in the private sector. The 1992 act specifically stated that one objective for Landsat 7’s data policy was to stimulate the development of a private market for enhanced data and value-added services, and it reiterated the terms for licensing private sector remote sensing satellite systems introduced in the 1984 legislation.⁵ The Commercial Space Act of 1998 encouraged the administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to purchase, as appropriate, space-based remote sensing data from commercial providers for Earth science research.⁶ These legislative milestones, initiated by the U.S. Congress and supported by several administrations, have also been encouraged by others in the space community,⁷ and the health and commercial viability of the private sector remote sensing industry will obviously be a factor in the future of public-private partnerships.

Congressional legislation and executive policy, as detailed in Table 1.1, have long encouraged the development of public and private sector relationships and interactions as a means of producing remote sensing data for scientific research. The most recent example is NASA’s Science Data Buy (SDB),⁸ an experimental program that began with both administration and congressional support in 1997. Earlier examples include the sale of Landsat data by the Earth Observation Satellite Company (EOSAT) in the 1980s and 1990s; the Sea-viewing Wide Field-of-view Sensor (SeaWiFS) program, an ongoing collaboration between NASA and OrbImage, Inc., that began in the 1990s; the Canadian government and private sector partnership with Radarsat; and the French government and private sector

investment in SPOT and Spot Image. In the United States, attempts to develop a publicly and privately funded small synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite program⁹ were unsuccessful, and a government (military)-funded hyperspectral sensor, “Warfighter,” housed on a commercial remote sensing spacecraft ended in a launch failure. The steering committee focused on the two active public-private partnerships that were established to provide scientific data to the research community—the SDB and SeaWiFS.

At present, a wide array of actors is involved in the production of satellite remote sensing data in the public, private, and scientific sectors. In the federal government, a functional division of labor for civilian remote sensing exists across science and operational agencies. NASA is the science agency responsible for technological innovation in space, including innovations in remote sensing technologies, and for providing remote sensing data for scientific research. NASA also was given responsibility for maintaining data centers for near-term access and dissemination of these research data, although it does not have responsibility for permanently archiving or preserving the data. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has responsibility for maintaining operational weather satellites, for archiving environmental and climate data,¹⁰ and for licensing commercial remote sensing satellite companies, as assigned in the Land Remote Sensing Policy Act of 1992. NOAA works closely with the U.S. Departments of Defense, Interior, and State, and the Central Intelligence Agency in this capacity. The U.S. Geological Survey maintains the National Satellite Land Remote Sensing Data Archive at the Earth Resources Observation Systems (EROS) Data Center in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, for data from Landsats 1 through 5 and 7 and the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR), and it plans to hold additional land remote sensing data as well. Other federal agencies, such as the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Departments of Transportation, State, and Agriculture, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, are increasingly found in the ranks of both research and applied data users. The National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA) is a clearinghouse

for remote sensing imagery and mapping data collected by the U.S. Department of Defense and the intelligence community.

The private sector in this field is divided into a large number of aerial remote sensing firms and a small number of satellite remote sensing firms. There are, at present, more than 200 aerial remote sensing firms in the United States.¹¹ There are also 12 U.S. private sector firms with licenses to launch some 40 satellites for Earth observation.¹² The private sector also includes value-added firms that provide services for clients.

The research community consists of scientists and engineers who are generally affiliated with universities and dedicated research centers, but can also be found in the government, the private sector, and nongovernmental organizations. The workshop held in March 2001 by the Steering Committee on Space Applications and Commercialization reflected this mix by including university scientists, government scientists, and those conducting research in the private sector.

Several variations of public-private sector interactions and relationships exist. In fact, the examples of partnerships discussed in this report—SeaWiFS and the SDB—represent two different approaches. SeaWiFS is partnership, while the SDB is akin to a redistributor-end user interaction. (The steering committee uses the term “public-private partnerships” to describe these relationships.)

Despite the policy emphasis in Washington, D.C., on the importance of public-private partnerships in satellite remote sensing and the belief that in some cases these partnerships or private sector data providers could replace government programs to provide remote sensing data for science, not all workshop participants agreed that this approach, a priori, was better than other possible approaches. The steering committee learned that some workshop participants saw great opportunities in new partnerships, while others said that public-private partnerships for science data have not met expectations to date. Most participants were more measured, seeing clear benefits in partnerships but recognizing that not all of the problems associated with the production and use of commercial data sources for research have been resolved. This report reflects these differences and emphasizes ways to enhance and strengthen new partnerships to the benefit of all partners. It became clear in the course of the steering committee’s work, and is discussed at greater length throughout the report, that public-private part-

nerships intended to produce data for scientific research have great promise, but that they must involve scientists throughout discussions that lead to arranging public-private partnerships.

Through the workshop and its discussions, the steering committee examined public-private partnerships in satellite remote sensing in terms of their capacity to provide useful data for scientific research. In Chapter 2, four models for providing satellite remote sensing data for scientific research are examined. Chapter 3 discusses the NASA Science Data Buy and SeaWiFS as experiments in public-private partnerships. Both programs were developed in response to the changing environment for satellite remote sensing, and both have been operating long enough to provide guidance for developing future public-private partnerships. In addition, these cases are the only examples to date of public-private partnerships that were created to provide remote sensing data for scientific research. Chapter 4 examines the differences in requirements and operations for scientific users of remotely sensed data and for commercial companies that produce the data. Issues such as data management, intellectual property, government processes, metrics, and others that surfaced at the workshop illustrate the contrast in priorities and requirements of the commercial sector and the scientific community. Chapter 5 reports on the steering committee’s findings and recommendations. Appendix A presents a table of selected remote sensing systems, Appendix B provides brief biographies of steering committee members and workshop speakers and panelists, Appendix C includes the workshop agenda and a list of participants, and Appendix D provides a list of acronyms for the report.