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A new space company, Houston-based Space Services Incorporated, had partnered with a traditional aerospace company that was expert at the production of small spacecraft, Ball Aerospace. Together with other partners who supplied instrumentation and ground support equipment, the companies formed the Space America team. Space America bid for the "commercialization" of the LANDSAT land remote sensing satellite system.
This program, begun in the heady days of the early ecology movement, shortly after those amazing images of the whole Earth taken from returning Apollo spacecraft had awakened a tremendous sense of environmental awareness, created a series of satellites, the LANDSAT spacecraft. The first LANDSAT was launched 23 July 1972. It successors, including LANDSATs 2 through 5, were operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), a part of the Department of Commerce.
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In 1984, the Reagan Administration's Commerce Department decided to commercialize the LANDSAT program, turning its newest spacecraft, LANDSAT 5, over to the private sector. Bidders were expected to produce follow-on spacecraft for the LANDSAT program, and would fund their initiatives by selling remote sensing imagery of Earth to commercial and non-commercial users.
That is precisely what Space America offered. They planned two follow-on spacecraft, expected to have private development funds and sales of imagery pay for most of the first satellite and all of the second, and planned to have both spacecraft in orbit to supplement the failing LANDSAT 4 and the new LANDSAT 5 by 1986. The government support for the early phase of the program would have been less than $100 million.
The Commerce Department decided to reject Space America's bid, disqualifying them on the grounds that they were an entrepreneurial company, operating with low overhead, and working to a purely commercial model. Instead, the bureau-rats at Commerce decided to play it safe, accepting the bid from the giant aerospace contractor Hughes, teamed with RCA in the Earth Observation Satellite Company, or EOSAT.
Thirteen years ago, Commerce committed itself, and now NASA, to an endless government subsidy, a huge boondoggle, and a tremendous waste of taxpayer money. EOSAT promised to launch four satellites in the decade from 1985 to 1995. They lied. They committed to do so only on the basis of huge annual subsidies, upwards of $300 million a year for the first five years.
The first EOSAT spacecraft, LANDSAT 6, wasn't launched until 1993. It failed to achieve orbit due to a ruptured hydrazine manifold on the spacecraft. LANDSAT 7 is not expected to be launched until June 1998, and we shall have to wait to see if it is able to achiee orbit.
Think about it. The two spacecraft designed by EOSAT to follow LANDSAT 5 into orbit were not ready for launch until 1993 and 1998, nine years and fourteen years, respectively, after LANDSAT 5 had been launched. The incompetence and audacious spending seems monumental.
Billions of dollars have been spent on LANDSAT 6 and 7. Billions more have been spent on NASA's "Mission to Planet Earth." Why does the agency tasked with exploration and settlement of space in its organizational charter have a mission to Earth? Is it possible that the space agency has difficulty finding Earth? Certainly their budget appropriations for remote sensing spacecraft are astronomical in nature.
The Commerce Department made a mistake. In typical bureaucratic fashion, they decided that it was safer to spend much more taxpayer money. Unfortunately, they picked incompetents who, in aeronautical parlance, "screwed the pooch." The failure of LANDSAT 6 and the 14-year wait for LANDSAT 7 are tributes to the certain stupidity of this approach.
NASA has also failed to develop an effective Earth remote sensing program. It should abandon its role in this area completely. Congress should restrict NASA to research, especially with regard to exploring the planets of our Solar System.
The private sector is eager to step in, providing Earth resource images from space on a purely commercial basis. It is high time the government got out of the business of providing these images.
There is no public interest to be served by government involvement in civil remote sensing. Military remote sensing is certainly needed, and has been very successful. It played an enormously important role in the Persian Gulf War, and continues to be of tremendous military value.
But the private sector is better suited to provide weather satellites, forestry survey satellites, oil and mineral exploration satellite systems, and ocean remote sensing systems. Private companies competing against each other will rapidly increase the number of space assets on orbit, will rapidly decrease the cost of Earth resource images, and will greatly expand the variety and quality of these images.
Next time you think about what an incredible job NASA and NOAA and Commerce have done with remote sensing, consider this fact: It has been 40 years since the first satellite launch, and we still have no real-time broadcast quality video of the whole Earth from space. None. There are no spacecraft in orbit providing such imagery, and at the rate the government is proceeding, there never will be.
Space is too important to be left up to bureaucrats.
