Longmont-based DigitalGlobe has successfully launched its newest imagery satellite, WorldView-1, from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.
About 100 employees, customers, partners and investors gathered to watch the launch in California at 11:35 a.m. PDT Tuesday.
"We're ecstatic," DigitalGlobe spokesman Chuck Herring said after the satellite went into orbit.
Several Denver-area companies have been working on the spy satellite and its launch. Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corp. in Boulder built the satellite. It was launched with a Delta II rocket from the United Launch Alliance, which has its headquarters in Centennial.
"It was uncanny how well it went," said Jim Good, director of program development for civil and operational space at Ball Aerospace. "We're feeling very good and very confident right now that everything is working properly."
WorldView-1 is in a new class of commercial imagery satellites and will be able to collect more images more quickly with greater locational accuracy.
The first images won't be available for a couple of weeks, Herring said.
"The international satellites are catching up in terms of resolution, but the WorldView era moves the U.S. again out to the next level," said DigitalGlobe chief executive Jill Smith. "We expect we will continue to have an aggressive lead over the international players for some number of years."
WorldView-1 will produce black-and-white imagery that can distinguish objects as small as one-half meter, superior resolution compared with DigitalGlobe's existing color- imagery satellite QuickBird at 0.6-meter resolution.
U.S. Rep. Mark Udall said in a statement Tuesday that the technology on WorldView-1 will provide more accurate information about population- growth and land-use changes and help with homeland-security and terrorism threats.
DigitalGlobe, which has about 400 employees, including about 300 in Longmont, received a $500 million contract for WorldView-1 from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which uses spy-satellite imagery for national security.
Ball Aerospace is already building another satellite, WorldView-2, for DigitalGlobe, to be completed in late 2008. WorldView-2 will be DigitalGlobe's third satellite in its constellation, producing color images and eventually replacing its first satellite, QuickBird, which is expected to reach the end of its life in three to four years.
DigitalGlobe competitor GeoEye, a Dulles, Va.-based company formed when Orbimage acquired Thornton-based Space Imaging last year, plans to launch its GeoEye-1 satellite next year with 0.41-meter resolution.
What a joke - What a waste of money.
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