A Delta 2 rocket that launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base on Saturday carried a colorful six-letter logo that symbolizes how far commercial satellite imagery has traveled in recent years.

The United Launch Alliance rocket, sporting a Google logo, and its cargo, the GeoEye-1 satellite, blasted off about

11:51 a.m. from Space Launch Complex-2.

The craft was released from the rocket about an hour after launch, and ground controllers in contact with GeoEye-1 said the satellite appeared healthy.

“All I can say is, let the party begin,” said an elated Val Webb, a GeoEye-1 spokeswoman.

After undergoing a checkout period, GeoEye-1 should begin providing high resolution images by late October or early November, officials said.

While the Delta rocket carried the usual mission stickers, one distinctive logo stood out and pointed to how far space-based imagery has come since September 1999 and the Vandenberg launch of Ikonos, GeoEye-1’s older sibling and the world’s first commercial high-resolution imaging satellite.

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Ikonos continues operating well beyond its expected lifespan of 5 to 7 years and is estimated to continue through 2010.

Two spectators at Saturday’s launch — Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin — also emphasized the advancement of the commercial Earth imagery. The pair were among several Google employees at Vandenberg on Saturday to view the launch.

“We’re pleased that today’s launch went smoothly, and we look forward to seeing great new imagery in Google Earth in the months to come,” said Google spokesman Brian O’Shaughnessy.

“GeoEye-1 will effectively take over from Ikonos when GeoEye-1 becomes operational,” said GeoEye spokesman Mark Brender. “However, Ikonos is operating fine and we expect it to continue to operate for the foreseeable future. So we will have a constellation of two high-resolution Earth-imaging satellites that can meet the demanding demands of customers.”

Ikonos helped prove that satellite images, once solely for government use, have other various purposes, such as oil industry, local governments and humanitarian relief.

One Internet company, soon followed by others, changed the market for satellite imagery. Nowadays, anybody can pull up a satellite image via Google Earth, or its competitors, Yahoo Maps and Microsoft Virtual Earth.

“When the business plans were written for Ikonos in the mid ’90s, the word ‘Google’ didn’t exist,” Brender said. “Who would have ever thought a company called Google or Yahoo would be a customer for satellite imagery when the Ikonos satellite was conceived in the early ’90s? Ikonos really pre-dated the Google Earth imagery revolution.”

The first Google Earth image from space was released in 2005, Brender said.

GeoEye has a exclusive agreement to provide satellite imagery only to Google Earth and Google Maps, which is why the Delta rocket carried a Google logo, officials said. The Google sticker is unusual as the firm doesn’t have any financial stake in the satellite or rocket.

“Regarding the logo, Google is interested in collecting the highest quality commercial satellite imagery available, and as a symbol of this commitment has agreed to put the company logo on the first stage of the GeoEye Inc. launch vehicle,” Google spokeswoman Kate Hurowitz said.

The craft’s manufacturer touts GeoEye as capable of distinguishing objects on the Earth’s surface as small as 16 inches in the panchromatic, or black and white, mode. GeoEye also will be able to collect multispectral, or color, imagery at a ground resolution of 5.4 feet.

“So we’ll be able to see home plate on a baseball diamond from 423 miles in space,” Brender said.

While the satellite will be able to collect highly detailed imagery, only select customers — the U.S. government — will get the best pictures. Federal licensing restrictions require GeoEye to downgrade imagery, to half-meter ground resolution, for nongovernment customers.

In black-and white-mode, GeoEye should produce images covering about 700,000 square kilometers a day, or about the size of Texas. In the color mode, the craft will collect images for about 350,000 square kilometers a day or an area about the size of New Mexico, Brender said.

“So GeoEye-1 will be a voracious collector and we’ll be able to collect large areas because the primary reason we exist is for mapping. The Ikonos and GeoEye-1 are basically mapping machines in orbit,” Brender added.

GeoEye-1 should operate for seven to 10 years; the firm hopes to launch GeoEye-2 by then.

Google is far from the biggest user of the satellite imagery. In 2004, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) awarded GeoEye a $500 million contract to build a satellite that could provide highly detailed images for national security purposes.

NGA paid for half the development of the GeoEye, and will have high priority for images once the satellite is operating, Brender said. Last year, about 55 percent of the firm’s revenues came from the contract with NGA.

Earth-imaging satellites like Ikonos, GeoEye and their competitor WorldView-1, are distant relatives of the U.S. government’s earliest spy satellites, called Corona, which also launched from Vandenberg a half century ago.

Janene Scully can be reached at 739-2214 or janscully@santamariatimes.com.

September 7, 2008