In an interview, Copple discussed
his vision for satellite imaging and some related issues, like the encroachment
on a domain historically owned and protected by spy agencies.
What does your company
do?
We sell satellite images
to just about every market you can name. They're used for a variety of
purposes, like people monitoring changes during disasters such as floods,
earthquakes, and hurricanes, as one example. When Hurricane Andrew struck
Florida, we went through and looked at the vegetation change that was caused
not only by hurricane winds but the saltwater intrusion into the beach
areas.
What will satellite imagery
be like in the future?
In five years, for instance,
you'll be accessing a global information database that is built on top
of satellite imagery of the world. So if you want to go anywhere in the
world you'll be able to point and click and you'll be able to view it,
find information about it. 'What are the street addresses of buildings?'
If you need to know, 'How do I get from the airport to the building?' or
'Where might I stay that's close to the location I want to go to?' -- all
that will be available through the Internet. There will be a global information
database of what we call spatial data that is geo-referenced to the Earth's
surface, so you'll basically have an image map of the world.
Commercial satellite imagery
is catching up to classified government imagery. Is this a problem, do
you think, for the government?
I think the government will
always have unique requirements, and we will build unique systems to satisfy
them. I think we have seen this in the recent press announcements by people
in the government to encourage commercial service to continue to develop
technology, move forward with it. And they have looked at setting aside
up to a billion dollars to buy commercial imagery from the satellite imagery
industry, given that the industry builds systems that meets their requirements.
What about privacy issues?
Will we be able to track others' movements?
The one thing about satellites
is that they only take a picture of what's in their general location. They
orbit the Earth so they're not hovering, they're not geo-stationary. These
types of satellites orbit the Earth, and for reasons very similar to those
that you have when you use your 35 millimeter camera, you want the sun
in a certain position when you take a picture so you get the optimum reflectance.
They're not good for monitoring
real-time events, as we've seen in some of the movies. Hollywood has kind
of overdone the capability as far as invasion of privacy goes. Your picture
gets taken when you drive down most interstate highways in the United States
now -- you're being video recorded by the traffic monitoring system.
In England, for instance,
there are over 300,000 cameras recording day-to-day information. I think
invasion of privacy by satellites is rather limited.
Are there any classified
sites you're not able to take pictures of?
We take and make available
everything, unless we are notified by the United States government. We
are licensed for the one-meter system by the U.S. government. They do have
the ability to black out specific coordinates on the Earth, should they
choose to do so.
Have they requested you
to do so?
No.
How big a business will
satellite imaging become?
We think it's in the $500
million to $1 billion range in the next couple of years. And then it grows
in the five- to seven-year timeframe to a $3-5 billion industry. Most of
the growth is due to the acceptance that we're seeing in the marketplace
of digital information sources, mostly being enabled by the Internet. Satellite
imagery needs more bandwidth from the Internet to be usable, because these
are rather large files. In order to access them and move around easily
without breaking them into tiny, tiny pieces you need more bandwidth. And
as the Internet increases in bandwidth -- when more people have cable modems
or some of other forms of access where your dealing with rather high data
rates -- then we'll be able to provide imagery products seamlessly to the
users at home. We see the consumer market really multiplying the size of
the marketplace in the three to five year timeframe: things like flight
simulation, education, tourism, real estate, media, and all the emerging
markets that are just now starting to understand what the satellite imaging
industry is.
What are some futuristic
uses for satellite imaging?
One would be the personal
assistant for hiking and navigation. One of satellite imagery's best features
is mapping. I can see where in the near future you'll be able to load imagery
into some kind of personal assistant, and next time you go on a hike in
the Rocky Mountains or Yellowstone National Park you'll be able to take
along your personal assistant and not get lost.
The vehicle navigation market
has already started to figure out how they're going to use satellite imagery.
Some further-out uses may
be in pilot training. As you learn to be a private pilot you may be able
to get on the Internet or a private screen and actually have a real live
simulator of your flight path, of your landing, of your takeoff.
All those things now you
have to go pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to have a simulator built
for it. You'll be able, from an instruction standpoint, to learn a lot
more.
We'll see geography classes
change where kids are actually able not only to see a picture of the same
geographic place, but they'll just get on the Internet as a classroom and
be able to zoom in to whatever the teacher is referencing or trying to
teach them about.
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