How Should We Pay for Earth Observation Data?
Earth observation, i.e. imaging from space, is increasingly getting to be a critical part of our lives. It provides valuable information on climate change, pollution, security, mapping, agriculture, fishing, construction projects and many other applications.
For some years now, US government agencies such as NASA have made the data from their satellites available free of charge. This has often sparked controversies. Some may feel that this undermines the investments of commercial satellite companies. Europe has tried to tread a middleway by charging for some data from earth observation satellites, including hybrid public-private sector satellites such as SPOT or entirely public sector ones like ERS and Envisat. Mixing public and private programmes has allowed Europe to gain confidence in the technology and to get benefits from the data.
What’s different now?
Two big changes have come about in the past five years that throw open the question again. First is the emergence of Google Earth as a source of high resolution imagery (to view, although not to process further), and second is the loosening of constraints on American military satellite imagery as well as the proliferation of high resolution imaging satellites across the globe.
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