Landsats Aff

AT: Private CP – Data Sharing

Gov key to LandSat data sharing
NASA 10 (http://landsat.gsfc.nasa.gov/news/news-archive/news_0316.html, November 30, DA 7/4/11, OST)

A joint report from the World Bank and United Nations titled Natural Hazards, UnNatural Disasters: The Economics of Effective Prevention examines the economic and human cost of natural disasters. The report, released earlier this month, concludes that there are many methods of prevention that governments can pursue that will not be prohibitively expensive. One such method is the sharing of weather and other Earth observation data. The report says, “even modest increases in spending [on forecasting data]— and greater sharing of data internationally—can have enormous benefits, especially to warn people of impending hazards.”
Landsats key to google earth
NASA 10 (landsat.gsfc.nasa.gov/news/news-archive/news_0320.html, 12/8, DA 7/4/11, OST)

Much of the publicly available satellite imagery that the Google Earth Engine provides for analysis has been collected by the Landsat program. This series of satellites, the world's longest continuing earth observation program (since 1972), is operated by the U.S. Geological Survey from our Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center in Sioux Falls, S.D. “Landsat satellites give us both a broad view of the landscape—with a perspective of over 12,000 square miles per scene—and a much more focused view. They can accurately describe the condition of a land area as small as the infield in a baseball diamond. In one instant look from over 400 miles in space, a single Landsat scene can record, at this level of accuracy, hundreds of thousands of acres of grassland, agricultural crops, or forests.

AT: Private CP – General

Privatization of landsat fails – empirics, no market, risk
Szajinfarber et al 9 (Zoe Szajnfarber,i Thomas G. Beatty,ii Matthew W. Petersen,iii Anna Vasilyeva,iv D. Brent Whitev and Annalisa L. Weigelvi Massachusetts Institute of Technology, i Doctoral Research Assistant, Engineering Systems Division, 17-110; Cambridge MA, 02139, AIAA Student Member ii Graduate Research Assistant, Department of Physics, iii Undergraduate Research Assistant, Department of Aeronautics & Astronautics, iv Graduate Research Assistant, Department of Aeronautics & Astronautics, v Doctoral Research Assistant, Department of Aeronautics & Astronautics, vi Assistant Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics and Engineering Systems, 11/3, http://seari.mit.edu/documents/preprints/SZAJNFARBER_SP_AIAA09.pdf, accessed 7-5-11, JMB)

Privatization, however, proved to be a failure. The government lowered its funding for commercialization and did not guarantee data purchasing. Various observations were missed because “there was no obvious and immediate buyer”18 while the price of Landsat imagery sharply increased. EOSAT’s responsibility was then renegotiated to developing only Landsat 6. Recognizing its failure, Congress passed the Land Remote Sensing Policy Act of 1992, repealing the 1984 act on commercialization and retaking funding responsibility from the private sector. It designated the DOC to complete and launch Landsat 6, and NASA and DoD to develop and launch Landsat 7. It was acknowledged that one of the greatest challenges of the future of environmental monitoring in the U.S. is the development of a coherent policy structure that balances both government and private data collection needs with US economic and security needs. Partly in response to this need, President Bush set forth a U.S. Commercial Remote Sensing Policy in 2003 to “advance and protect U.S. national security and foreign policy interests by maintaining the nation’s leadership in remote sensing space activities, and by sustaining and enhancing U.S. remote sensing industry.”19 Through this policy, government use of commercially produced remote sensing data is encouraged while the U.S. government’s focus will be on providing remote sensing systems that “cannot be effectively, affordably, and reliably satisfied by commercial providers”.vi This policy can be seen in action with the release of OSTP's 2007 “A Plan for a U.S. National Land Imaging Program”, for which USGS has received a budget line. It is but one step towards developing a plan of action for the US regarding the future of remote sensing.xvi In addition to introducing many of the key stakeholders in the remote sensing system – NASA, NOAA, DoD, USGS, USDA – this brief history highlights some of the key trade-offs that will be explored in more depth throughout the remainder of this report. Firstly, the primary users of space-based data do not have the expertise to collect it, or even operate the satellites. For example, where USGS was historically wholly responsible for all aspects of geological surveys, now with the advent of satellite imagery, USGS must rely on other government agencies (i.e., NASA, NOAA, DoD and at times commercial entities) to build and operate the satellites and provide them with the required data. This creates a coordination challenge, both in terms of the allocation of public resources and the hand-off of responsibility from one government agency to another. Secondly, while it is relatively well recognized that the government has no place managing a commercializable commodity, the failure to commercialize Landsat is illustrative of the difficulty in determining when a technology is sufficiently mature to be designated “operational/commercializable.” While the failure can be partially attributed to an overestimation of the addressable market, an important reason for the lack of interest among commercial contractors stems from the enormous program risk associated with advanced satellite development.
Commercialization fails

Conway 8 (Erik, historian, NASA, 3/3, http://history.nasa.gov/sp4801-part2.pdf, accessed 7-3-11, CH)

Finally, the last applications satellite type I’ll discuss in this extended editorial essay is land use. As Pam Mack has shown in her book on Landsat, there were many possible and interested users of satellite-based land imaging during its developmental period, and their competing goals and interests made development of the system very difficult. 30 And partly because of this, and also partly due to pentagon restrictions on allowable spatial resolution (because of ill-conceived congressional efforts to force “privatization” of Landsat), Landsat has never achieved a large enough user base to pay for itself. instead, its imagery has been used by researchers, not by the economic interests that might be able to afford it on a commercial basis. 31 Indeed, the primary buyer of the data has been the intelligence community, which apparently finds that Landsat data serves as an effective supplement to its own classified imagery sources. The satellite series itself has lurched from one crisis to the next, with each administration since Reagan willing to commit to only one more mission prior to commercialization; with commercialization never succeeding, each new administration has had to cope with the question of how to continue the series. The fundamental policy issues of what agency should maintain the capability and who should pay for it have not been resolved. So Landsat has been a technical success, but programmatically its history has been tortured. At the very least, there’s a good policy study here for someone interested in the subject.