Spy satellites for everyone

On September 30th, less than a week after it left Vandenberg Air Force Base on a Lockheed Martin Athena II rocket, Iconos opened its electronic eye to peer down through 400 miles of space and sky and capture the first high-resolution image produced by a commercial spy satellite. The result is a starkly beautifully black and white photo of Washington, D.C. on which you can count the number of cars leaving National Airport and see clearly the scaffolding around the Washington Monument.

The picture marked the culmination of Space Imaging Inc.'s second attempt at hoisting a commercial imaging satellite into orbit. The first try in April was also named Iconos -- which the company says derives from the Greek word for "image" -- but might better have been called Icarus after a take-off snafu abandoned it just short of orbit but high enough to burn up in the Earth's atmosphere.

Iconos II, however, appears to be a smashing success. The eye in the sky is lodged in a "sun-synchronous" low altitude near-polar orbit that allows it to cover the entire surface of the Earth in a twenty-four hour period. It snaps color photos at four meters per pixel, and monochrome images at one meter's resolution. You can't read a license plate, but you can easily distinguish a car from a bus and tell whether it is light or dark in color.

And in January, all that surveillance power will be at the command of anyone who can afford to pay $1000 a picture, and we'll all be that much closer to living in a Neal Stephenson novel.

Space Imaging expects Iconos to be indispensable in dozens of applications ranging from cartography to helping farmers monitor their crops. National governments that can't afford their own spy satellites will probably find the service useful as well. However, under the Denver-based company's U.S. license, it cannot take orders from known terrorist states; it must halve its image resolution when taking pictures of Israel; and the U.S. government can restrict the imaging when national security demands it.

If the government seems a bit squeamish about the whole thing, that's probably because they've enjoyed a near monopoly on spy satellites for forty years. And while Iconos doesn't rival the resolution delivered by the government's top secret "Key Hole" series of orbiting eyes, it's better than anything that's been offered commercially before.

And it's available to anyone. Custom images start at $1000, and once a photo is taken it will be sold on the company's web site - which currently offers a free download of the Washington D.C. picture. Space Imaging will begin processing custom orders in January, and they are now taking advance orders over a toll free 800 number, which I put to the test with the most obvious inquiry.

"Could you take a picture of Area 51?" I asked the voice on the phone.

"Did you, by any chance, send in an email the other day?" he replied.

I hadn't. It turns out that I wasn't the first to think of fun applications for a populist spy satellite, and, yes, they would be happy to take a picture of Area 51, Studio 54, or Route 66.

"It's not like we check every coordinate to see what they're buying," explained Mark Brender, Space Imaging's Washington Operations Director.

This is a surveillance product I truly love. What, if anything, do you want photographed from above? Let me know in the talkback below.