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data for the needs of civil society operate low cost receiving stations 
Figure 1. Direct reception of broadcast data allows the space industry to concentrate on the space segment 
whilst local private enterprise can grow to create markets and add value. 
5 COMPETITION VS. CO-OPERATION 
In an industrial sense co-operation and competition are not incompatible. Co-operation leads to lower costs and this 
reduces entry barriers and so increases competition. This is clearly true for the new generation of ground stations. It is 
also true of small satellites, as more and more organisations are capable of supplying quality and reliable satellites at 
affordable prices. None of the players in the smallsat and low-cost ground station sectors have tried to lock-in 
proprietary technologies as the pace of change is such that they all have a shared interest in the adoption of common 
standards and open systems. This however is not the case of the builders and operators of very high resolution 
commercial systems. 
From the point of view of a data user or an information provider, two images are only direct substitutes for each other 
when they are acquired under identical conditions and at the same time. In practice this is almost never the case and for 
the majority of operational environmental monitoring activities developed to date, and for many more potential 
applications, the existence of a second image of the same area increases the value of a first image. Clearly for the 
operator of a small EO satellite there are benefits from co-ordinating sensor, orbit and communication characteristics 
with other operators. These benefits include: gaining access to much more data at the same cost; greatly increasing the 
uptake of the use of the system by halving the revisit period, reducing the cloud cover risk; augmenting the potential 
application of the data to include dynamic studies; and increasing the reliability, for the end users, who reduce their 
dependence on one particular satellite. 
Care has been taken to draw a distinction between very high resolution data and high or medium resolution data. Fritz 
(1999) observes that "it is generally accepted that ten meters is the largest scale needed by international “public good” 
programs for monitoring the Earth". This distinction has also been made by Vibulsreth (1999), Neer (1999) and others. 
Although Fritz also worries about whether the commercial viability of the new VHR systems could be threatened since 
"some high resolution government systems, such as Cartosat (India) and Helios (France) potentially could become 
commercially competitive". 
However the data from low cost small satellites is not likely to compete with such VHR systems. Neither are they 
likely to compete directly with the high resolution public systems, which should be able to exploit their greater 
radiometric and geometric stability and synoptic mapping capacity. Indeed, the demand for such detailed base maps 
will rise as they will be invaluable for fully exploiting the data from small satellites. Furthermore, the growth of the 
ground segment that the small satellite systems and distributed ground stations promise, could lead to a larger market 
for these higher specification products. 
6 CONCLUSIONS 
Current international Earth Observation programmes aim to meet the needs of the scientific community to better 
understand the Earth as an integrated system through the provision of ever more data, at higher resolutions and with 
more spectral content..4Meanwhile, new commercial operators are setting their sites on supplying the billion dollar 
geomatics industries of the developed world. Though the objectives of these programmes are legitimate and important 
they fail to address the needs of environmental managers especially in developing countries and civil society. This 
Paper has tried to show how the regular, reliable and low cost information required to contribute to sustainable 
development by effectively monitoring the environment could be provided by exploiting EO's unique comparative 
advantages. 
The local managers of the environment including government agencies, local authorities, resource custodians and non- 
governmental organisations require low cost data, regularly, and reliably. It is also widely recognised that they need the 
  
International Archives of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing. Vol. XXXIII, Part Bl. Amsterdam 2000. 75